e/T Child s 
 
 Marj^ Aronetta Wilbur 
 
/ 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2007 with funding from 
 
 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/childsreligionOOwilbrich 
 
A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
A Child's Religion 
 
 By 
 
 Mary Aronetta Wilbur 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 Every- Day Business for Women 
 
 Boston and New York 
 Houghton Mifflin Company 
 
 1917 ^ 
 
W r 
 
 COPYRIGHT, I917, BY MARY ARONETTA WILBUR 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published March iqij 
 
TO 
 
 THE BLESSED MEMORY 
 OF MY DEAR MOTHER 
 
 fttars lEunfce <top9 WiiVbuv 
 
 WHO FROM YOUTH TO OLD AGE 
 
 TAUGHT LITTLE CHILDREN 
 
 THE LOVE OF 
 
 GOD 
 
 359424 
 
L'ENVOI 
 
 Go^ little book; God speed thee on thy way^ "i 
 And bear thy message straight to loyal hearts y 
 Who^ seeing all to-morrow in to-day y 
 Are striving in the strength His grace im- 
 parts 
 To guide God's little pilgrims^ lest they stray. 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 THESE brief papers are the outgrowth 
 of many years of observation and expe- 
 rience in the teaching and religious training 
 of children. The conclusions have been 
 drawn from cases of neglect as well as from 
 those of nurture; for we are admonished by 
 the one sort, and advised by the other. 
 
 Thomas K. Beecher once declared to a 
 company of Sunday-School teachers : " You 
 cannot give your children religion; that is 
 not your province. Your work is to keep the 
 child in position before God." A vastly im- 
 portant and tender work that is ; and these 
 papers have been written from time to time, 
 as occasion demanded, to consider certain 
 aspects of that work. Many of them have 
 appeared in The Churchman^ and are here re- 
 printed by the courtesy of that paper. In 
 their collected form it is hoped that they may 
 have a wider usefulness than the single ar- 
 ticles could have. 
 
X FOREWORD 
 
 May every teacher of children find here 
 some of the blessing that the preparation of 
 these papers has brought to the writer. 
 
 Washington, D.C, 1917 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. A CHILD S RELIGION . 
 
 II. THE CHILD AND THE CHURCH 
 
 III. CHILDREN AND MISSIONS , 
 
 IV. THE SONG AND THE CHILD 
 V. THE CHILD AND HIS BOOK 
 
 VI. ON TELLING BIBLE STORIES 
 
 VII. A SUNDAY-SCHOOL TEACHER* S BIOGRAPHY 
 
 VIII. THE CHILDLIKE TEACHER 
 
 IX. THE OLD BIBLE AND THE NEW CHILD 
 
 
 • 1 
 
 I 
 
 
 • t 
 
 . lO 
 
 
 • * 
 
 . 26 
 
 
 • t 
 
 ► 39 
 
 
 • 
 
 55 
 
 BIOGRAP 
 
 HY 
 
 .. 67 
 • 79 
 
 • 
 
 • 
 
 • 93 
 
 CHILD 
 
 • 
 
 . 114 
 
A Child's Religion 
 
 A CHILD* S RELIGION 
 
 A Study from Life 
 
 IT is a vital question with Christian par- 
 ents at what age a child's religious train- 
 ing should begin. Some take psychological 
 alarm at the idea of expecting a child to 
 appreciate anything as mysterious and dif- 
 ficult as religion : forgetting that childhood 
 loves mystery. Some postpone the teaching, 
 because they are really at a loss how to im- 
 part what they themselves earnestly believe, 
 and so let the child's instruction wait until a 
 Sunday-School teacher can give it to him. 
 It is with the desire to throw some light upon 
 both these aspects of the case that I have de- 
 tailed the experiences following. The child 
 described was not abnormal or precocious in 
 any way, and the results achieved, and the 
 
2 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 means by which they were obtained, were not 
 at all unusual. The mother gave no thought to 
 such problems as heredity and environment, 
 but her strong sense told her that if a child 
 is to be religious, it must be taught the faitR ; 
 and that the religious influence upon char- 
 acter, exerted by the environment during 
 the tender, formative years, should be abun- 
 dantly supplied by home instruction and 
 formal services. , 
 
 This is the story of what that child was 
 taught, and the child's impressions and re- 
 sultant education. 
 
 According to my mother's account, it was 
 her custom to tell me Bible stories in those 
 early morning hours when a two-year-old 
 awakes, and the nurse has not yet arrived; 
 and so fond of them did I become that, 
 when sleepiness forced her to stop, I would 
 pull at her eyelids and demand, "More 
 Moses, more Joseph." 
 
 Next I seem to have made the acquaint- 
 ance of Jonah, and when I tumbled from 
 my hobby-horse and my father asked the 
 
A CHILD'S RELIGION 3 
 
 reason for the racket, he was promptly in- 
 formed that "Jonah fell overboard." I do 
 not know when I was first taught, "Now I 
 lay me down to sleep," but so strongly was 
 it impressed upon my consciousness that it 
 was the correct prayer, that I was nearly 
 grown before I dared to omit it, feeling that 
 my prayers would be incomplete without it. 
 
 I was taken to church at the tender age 
 of four, and expected to keep quiet during 
 a forty-minute sermon, and a long prayer 
 of fifteen minutes, the old-fashioned Presby- 
 terian sort. It is perhaps needless to say that 
 I did not always succeed, and one day was 
 ignominiously taken out of church during 
 service, for bad behavior, taken home and 
 put to bed by my mother, and later whipped 
 by my father. The only impression that these 
 early experiences made on my mind was, 
 that church was the proper place to go on 
 Sunday morning, and that I must behave 
 myself there. 
 
 My notion of heaven became definite in 
 my sixth year, when my father died. I re- 
 membered his funeral distinctly and espe- 
 
4 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 cially the Masonic rite. Thereafter heaven 
 was where my beloved father had gone ; and 
 I awoke to the consciousness that I was the 
 head of the little band of sisters, and must 
 teach them what my father had taught me 
 — to scorn a lie, and to fear nothing. 
 
 I think the stories of the Christ Child and 
 the Saviour were taught me before I could 
 remember. I seem to have had a protective 
 and proprietary feeling for the Baby Jesus, 
 which changed with my growth; until it 
 was Christ, the Friend and Elder Brother, 
 the Helper who understood what I needed 
 and wanted, that claimed my love and 
 loyalty. 
 
 My next recollection dates from my 
 eighth year. I was with my grandmother 
 at Clifton Springs; one Sunday morning she 
 was unable to attend chapel services, so my 
 younger sister and I went alone. It was a 
 communion service, and I think the first 
 that I had ever seen; and when the invita- 
 tion was given to "all who love the Lord 
 Jesus in sincerity and truth," I promptly 
 went forward, undeterred by the fact that I 
 
A CHILD'S RELIGION 5 
 
 was the only child kneeling at the altar rail. 
 The minister passed me by in the distribu- 
 tion of the Elements; an omission which hurt 
 me, and which I could not comprehend, be- 
 cause I was sure that the invitation had in- 
 cluded me — for did not I love the Lord 
 Jesus? My grandmother explained it later, 
 and thereafter I looked forward to the day 
 when I should be a church member. 
 
 On my eighth birthday I was given a 
 Bible, and I promised my mother to read 
 ten verses every morning; a promise I scru- 
 pulously kept, reading ten verses, and no 
 more, straight through from Genesis to Rev- 
 elation, not omitting the twelve genealogical 
 chapters of First Chronicles. 
 
 Somewhere about this time I remember 
 believing absolutely in the power of prayer, 
 and testing it whenever I lost anything, by 
 asking that I might find the article; and I 
 have a distinct recollection of many answers. 
 When I read of the promise, "If ye have 
 faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say 
 unto this mountain, Remove hence to yon- 
 der place, and it shall remove (Matt. 17:20), 
 
6 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 I was much impressed, and after much de- 
 liberation determined to try it, but was 
 deterred by the fact that there was n't a 
 mountain within three hundred miles of our 
 house ; so I decided to postpone the trial 
 until I could watch the effect of my com- 
 mand. 
 
 At night my mother used to read to me 
 the stories of the Exodus and the Wilder- 
 ness, and the old Bible hero-tales, from a 
 Bible illustrated by Dore and other famous 
 artists; and these heroes were as real to me 
 as the men of the Revolution were after- 
 wards; and I caught their message, that 
 God punished the wicked and rewarded the 
 good, and that those who trusted Him were 
 not left desolate. 
 
 Our usual Sunday programme was to go 
 to church in the morning. Then after din- 
 ner we were required to study our Sunday- 
 School lesson, and to learn a verse to recite 
 at prayers on Sunday night ; sometimes we 
 older ones were assigned a topic for our 
 verses and had to consult the concordance 
 to find them. ' 
 
A CHILD'S RELIGION 7 
 
 Sometimes, if the time was very long, as 
 it was in summer when Sunday-School be- 
 gan at five o'clock, we were asked to learn a 
 hymn ; memorizing was easy work, and we 
 soon acquired a large stock of hymns. 
 
 I was duly impressed by the fact that my 
 grandfather's favorite psalm had been the 
 ninetieth, and that my father's favorite chap- 
 ter had been the twenty-second of Revela- 
 tion I admired both of these ancestors, so, 
 of course, it troubled me that I had no 
 favorite portion of Scripture. After much 
 thought I selected the twenty-fifth of Mat- 
 thew for my chapter, as the picturesqueness 
 of the sheep and the goats, the ten virgins 
 and the story of the talents appealed to me; 
 that seemed a good chapter because it had 
 so much in it, and I was well satisfied with 
 my selection. 
 
 The promises of the Bible, made to the 
 old Hebrews or specific people, I applied 
 to myself, and expected their fulfillment; 
 being just as sure that I was one of the 
 elect as I was that I came from Pilgrim 
 stock. Hell never frightened me; that was 
 
8 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 a place where somebody I did n't know was 
 going ; I was booked for heaven. 
 
 There must have been much direct teach- 
 ing of holy things by my mother and by 
 the Sunday-School teachers, who were all 
 women of beautiful character, but that I 
 do not remember distinctly. I do remember, 
 however, that from the age of twelve I was 
 trying to " be good " as I understood it, and 
 I took my first communion on my four- 
 teenth birthday. Thereafter I left child- 
 hood, with its curious misinterpretations, 
 behind, and the growth in grace was accom- 
 panied by a growth in knowledge as well. 
 
 It was inevitable that I should pass through 
 a period of doubt when I left college, for 
 most young people do, but through it all I 
 never doubted that God is and God loves. 
 That was my creed rock when everything 
 else was storm-driven, and that was so in- 
 grained into my consciousness by my early 
 training that I could no more doubt it than 
 I could doubt my own existence. And 
 when in later life the second storm came, 
 aroused by a study of the extreme higher 
 
A CHILD'S RELIGION 9 
 
 criticism, and in that first shock it seemed 
 that everything I had ever known or be- 
 lieved was being swept away from me; this 
 faith stayed, and, helped by the unshaken 
 faith of my mother, I weathered that storm 
 also, and came into the quiet haven of re- 
 adjusted views and clearer faith. 
 
F 
 
 II 
 
 THE CHILD AND THE CHURCH 
 
 OUR times in the New Testament we 
 have a record of Christ dealing with 
 children. First when He took a little child, 
 and setting him in the midst, taught from 
 the living text a lesson in humility to the 
 apostles, who were disputing such a the- 
 ological abstraction as rank in heaven ; de- 
 claring that the little child was his personal 
 representative, for " whosoever shall receive 
 one such little child in my name, receiveth 
 me." And again, when He took the chil- 
 dren in his arms, and bade them "suffer 
 the little children to come to me," and 
 blocked the way with no theological dogma, 
 as his Church has sometimes mistakenly 
 done. At the triumphal entry into Jerusalem 
 the prelude of the world's greatest week, no 
 blare of trumpets heralded his approach to 
 the royal city, but children's voices acclaimed 
 the children's Friend as King. And after the 
 
CHILD AND CHURCH ii 
 
 Resurrection, when repentant St. Peter was 
 protesting his love, he was charged to show 
 it by obeying the injunction, "Feed my 
 lambs/' 
 
 Strange is it indeed, in the light of these 
 records, to read the story of the succeeding 
 ages, and see how minor a place this com- 
 mand of Christ's occupied in the Church's 
 history. We have been slow to grasp the 
 full significance of these events, and have 
 spent ages in controversy, while the little 
 children wandered; and have often been far 
 more zealous in driving heretics or unbeliev- 
 ers out of the Church, than in training the 
 future members within the fold. For the 
 child of to-day is the Church of the future. 
 
 According to Professor Kidd, the dis- 
 tinctive feature of nineteenth-century civ- 
 ilization is its regard for the future as 
 shown by its interest in the child. But the 
 potentiality of child life is only just being 
 realized; its psychology is studied, and the 
 value of early and correct education em- 
 phasized; and the enormous effect that physi- 
 cal environment may have upon the child's 
 
12 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 tendencies toward good and evil is pro- 
 foundly impressed upon many. The import 
 of these facts the Church is slowly per- 
 ceiving, but she has not yet used all the 
 forces that science has put into her hands. 
 She seems like one awakening from sleep, 
 whose eyes are opened and whose body 
 moves slightly, while the full personality 
 still slumbers. For her leaders see the need 
 and the importunate opportunity ; but the 
 whole body of her membership is not yet 
 aroused to its duty and privilege in this 
 matter. 
 
 It may be of interest to note some rela- 
 tions in which the Church has stood to the 
 child from an early date. Earliest was youth- 
 ful, or infant, baptism, whereby the Church 
 claimed the children as her own. In the 
 mediaeval Church, the ceremony of baptism 
 for the child strikingly expressed this idea 
 of membership. The child was met outside 
 the church door by the priest, and after 
 some ceremonial, which included a prayer 
 of exorcism, was then led into the church 
 by the priest. After the baptism, which was 
 
CHILD AND CHURCH 13 
 
 usually trine immersion, he was vested in a 
 white robe, and a lighted candle was put into 
 his hand, symbolizing by the pure vesture 
 and burning light the preparation to meet 
 the heavenly bridegroom. 
 
 In the lifetime of our blessed Lord the 
 Jewish Church was diligently instructing 
 her youth in regularly established schools, 
 in which the law, the prophets, the Jewish 
 history and poetry were taught ; and it is 
 probable that it was in one of these schools 
 that He manifested that growth in wisdom 
 which was recorded of Him. The Christian 
 Church early realized the need of instruc- 
 tion, for her future members, old or young, 
 and the catechumens were fully instructed. 
 In these schools catechisms were used; these 
 were brief statements of great doctrines and 
 truths, given orally, and easily memorized; 
 so that the catechumens might be qualified 
 to " give to every man a reason for the faith 
 that was in him." By this means they learned 
 the chief facts of the Gospel narratives, and 
 were taught faith by the Creed, hope from 
 the Lord's Prayer, and charity from the 
 
14 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 Decalogue, with Its prescribed duties to God 
 and man. 
 
 But in the darker and decadent days of 
 the Church this form of instruction lan- 
 guished. With the stirring of the Reforma- 
 tion catechetical instruction was revived as a 
 valuable aid to knowledge of the truth ; and 
 reformers of widely varying views saw its 
 importance. Calvin laid great stress upon the 
 Sunday noon instruction of children, and 
 wrote a catechism intended for them, but 
 his work was hardly adapted to the child 
 mind. Luther vehemently exclaimed, " Let 
 the people be taught; let schools be opened 
 for the poor, let the truth reach them in 
 simple words in their own mother tongue, 
 and they will believe ! " To facilitate this 
 teaching, he wrote his own catechism in 
 such simple phrases that it ''did much to 
 mould the character of the German people." 
 The Westminster Catechism has been an 
 influence in character building for the older 
 generation of Presbyterians all over the 
 world; and although many of its definitions 
 are difficult for children, yet this document 
 
CHILD AND CHURCH 15 
 
 has been *' closely associated with Scottish 
 public elementary education," and a rugged 
 piety built itself upon "the chief end of 
 man is to glorify God." By the fifty-ninth 
 canon of 1603, and the rubric of the Prayer 
 Book, the clergy were enjoined to teach the 
 catechism of the English Church, which was 
 set forth in 1549, on Sundays and on holy 
 days after the second lesson at Evening 
 Prayer; and the heads of families were held 
 accountable for the religious instruction of 
 their families and dependents. The brief 
 and simple statements of this catechism 
 were easy to learn, and " its very simplicity 
 has given it a firm hold on the inner life 
 and consciousness of devout members of 
 the Anglican Communion throughout the 
 world." 
 
 But all this provision concerned itself 
 chiefly with those within the fold of the 
 Church, and many good people began, after 
 a while, to realize that the multitude were 
 growing up in ignorance of any religious 
 teaching. John Wesley, as early as 1737, 
 held Sunday classes, while in charge of the 
 
i6 A CHILD^S RELIGION 
 
 parish of Savannah, Georgia. In 1782, the 
 philanthropist, Robert Raikes, opened a 
 school for poor children; at first combining 
 secular and religious instruction, and hold* 
 ing its sessions on Saturday and Sunday. 
 The use of child labor in the mills soon 
 made it impossible for the children to come 
 except on Sundays. The industrial evolu- 
 tion which characterized the end of the 
 eighteenth century also stirred the Church 
 to follow Raikes's lead, and organize Sun- 
 day-Schools on an extensive scale. 
 
 So the movement has grown, until now 
 an eminent encyclopaedist asserts that "there 
 is no doubt that the great Sunday-School 
 organizations of the various churches still 
 deserve to be reckoned among the educa- 
 tional assets of the nation, and as agencies, 
 both of religious instruction and of general 
 culture, they may tend, under modern edu- 
 cational and religious developments, to play 
 an increasingly important part." 
 
 Although the necessity for a Sunday- 
 School is an accepted fact, and these schools 
 are established in every parish, there are 
 
CHILD AND CHURCH 17 
 
 important questions concerning them still 
 unsolved, which relate chiefly to their man- 
 agement and conduct. Some of these we 
 shall now consider. 
 
 There are many systems in vogue, all 
 trying to answer the question, What shall 
 the Sunday-School teach ? If we remember 
 that it is the Church of Christ dealing with 
 its own present or prospective members, we 
 shall see that above all things it must teach 
 Jesus Christ. It is not sufficient to ground 
 the children in the facts of the Bible, if we 
 do not teach its spirit. A child may be able 
 to tell the story of every miracle, and de- 
 scribe every great event in the life of our 
 Lord, and still fail to grasp the fact that He 
 was an actual personality, and really lived 
 on earth ; or that his life had or has any 
 bearing on our daily life. We must make 
 this a part of the child's life by very definite 
 teaching, not contenting ourselves with the 
 inculcation of motives alone. Scientists tell 
 us that, even when a person is hypnotized, 
 he cannot be compelled to do a thing which 
 he has been definitely taught is wrong ; so 
 
i8 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 that carefully trained people cannot be made 
 to steal or to murder^ because the definite 
 instruction of early life has created an inhib- 
 itive process, which controls the will in those 
 directions. So let us teach, "Thou shalt," 
 and " Thou shalt not," and help the child 
 to bring all the actions of life into one or 
 the other of these categories. 
 
 And because it is the Church's school, we 
 teach the child the historic creeds which 
 embody the faith of Christendom ; and we 
 should teach him also the history of that 
 Church, that he may know the connection 
 between apostolic days and ours, and rever- 
 ence the hoary and venerable body which, 
 whatever her mistakes may have been, has 
 still guarded the faith through nearly twenty 
 centuries. 
 
 But these things must be vitalized also. 
 A creed is not merely a form of words — 
 a creed means a life ; and those old Cru- 
 saders, who stood with hand on sword as 
 they recited the creed, had the right idea. 
 " I believe, therefore I serve," is the full ex- 
 tension of a creed,, for " faith without works 
 
CHILD AND CHURCH 19 
 
 is dead." Hence it follows that the child 
 should be taught definite forms of service 
 for the Lord Jesus Christ, as well as words 
 of faith. In the work of the Church as well 
 as outside of it he should be made to know 
 where and how a child can help to conquer 
 the world for Christ ; for service stirs love 
 and increases loyalty. 
 
 It is eminently in the province of the 
 Sunday-School to teach a reverence for holy 
 things, and a reverent demeanor in church. 
 That there is a crying need for such teach- 
 ing among our American children and 
 adults, any one who travels widely may 
 easily observe. Let us teach it early, for a 
 character without reverence misses much in 
 depth and a proper adjustment to life. And 
 it must be taught by example as well as 
 precept. 
 
 Since the object of a Sunday-School is to 
 train the future membership of the Church, 
 confirmation is a distinct point to be attained, 
 and it is toward this that the rector, as pastor, 
 must lead his little lambs. " I will give you 
 pastors according to mine heart, who shall 
 
20 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 feed you with knowledge and understand- 
 ing" (Jeremiah 3: 15), was one of the 
 promises of the golden future for obedient 
 Israel, and when such feed the lambs they 
 are well fed. 
 
 Not always has there been the careful in- 
 struction and preparation that now usually 
 precedes that rite ; and Bishop Cosins relates 
 that, even after the Reformation, bishops 
 would confirm candidates in the highways 
 and on the streets without any " sacred solem- 
 nity." That time has happily gone by, and 
 the parishes are few where conscientious and 
 faithful instruction is not given to the candi- 
 dates for confirmation. To the properly 
 trained child confirmation will be a longed- 
 for privilege, and the young heart will glow 
 with the desire to induce others to enjoy this 
 privilege. 
 
 There is a great waste of spiritual energy 
 just here in many cases; and the faithful pas- 
 tor should see to it that every confirmed 
 person is set to work at once. Let each be 
 made to feel that the least that one can do, 
 and the first thing to be done, is to find some 
 
CHILD AND CHURCH 21 
 
 one person to whom he can act the part of 
 brother and help him to find the Christ cen- 
 ter of life. It is not too much to say that 
 upon the inculcation of this spirit depends 
 the future growth of the Church, "the gift 
 that is in us " by the laying on of hands, 
 needs stirring up if it is to increase. 
 
 There still remain two questions concern- 
 ing the Sunday-School, and upon the answers 
 to these its success must largely depend. 
 Who shall be the scholars and the teachers? 
 and how can we get them ? 
 
 It is not always an easy matter to get even 
 all the baptized children of the Church to 
 come to Sunday-School. There are cases 
 known -^ few, I trust — where the little chil- 
 dren of the rich will not come to a Sunday- 
 School which contains poor children, for 
 fear of contracting some disease. One parish 
 meets this need by having a Saturday school 
 for the religious instruction of the little 
 children of the rich, while the poor come to 
 the regular Sunday-School. How this plan 
 will meet the situation is yet problematical, 
 for it is still on trial. 
 
22 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 A personal canvass of the households of the 
 parish and the neighborhood seems to be the 
 most effective way of reaching the children. 
 A most influential method also is to encour- 
 age the boys and girls already in the Sunday- 
 School to bring recruits, stipulating that 
 they shall not be drawn from other schools. 
 Every member of the parish should be on 
 the alert to get children into the training 
 school of the Church ; for unless every mem- 
 ber of the Church realizes the importance 
 of training children, and takes some part in 
 furthering that work, by effort and example, 
 it cannot all be done. The work of register- 
 ing every child born in the parish on the 
 Cradle Roll of the Sunday-School might well 
 be done by those who do not teach in it; the 
 child thus grows up in the Sunday-School. 
 
 There is a great call for teachers and a 
 great need for their training, for to the 
 awakened consciousness of to-day it is not 
 enough that a teacher should interest her 
 class, she must really train and teach them. 
 It seems that it would be a wise provision 
 for this need to have a Normal Class con- 
 
CHILD AND CHURCH 23 
 
 nected with every Sunday-School. This class 
 might meet on a week-day, if that proved to 
 be more convenient, although the moral effect 
 would be better if its sessions were held at 
 the regular hour. Here the older pupils, 
 young men and young women, could be 
 taught how to tell a Bible story, how to 
 explain great doctrines simply, and how to 
 keep order and excite interest in the things 
 of the spirit. Fathers and mothers of young 
 children could attend this class for Instruc- 
 tion, for many parents need such help, 
 and would welcome it. This need not be a 
 rector's class, for all rectors are not teachers, 
 unfortunately; perhaps in the future a course 
 in pedagogy will be provided and required 
 by our theological seminaries to fit the men 
 for the teaching work that every rector finds 
 opportunity to do. A successful teacher of 
 experience would be the best leader. 
 
 But still the question comes, How shall we 
 get men and women to teach in our Sunday- 
 Schools ? Train the Sunday-School children 
 for it; let the Normal Class be the goal of their 
 endeavor through the years of their pupilage, 
 
24 A CHILD^S RELIGION 
 
 and impress upon them their moral obh'ga- 
 tion to teach as they have been taught. And 
 further, the spirit of self-sacrifice still lives 
 in the Church, and although it may mean the 
 giving up of a Sunday afternoon of relaxa- 
 tion, I believe that the teachers may be 
 found. Let the Church pray for her teachers, 
 as for her priests, and pray earnestly to find 
 them, that those whom the Lord has called 
 may offer themselves for this work. 
 
 For truly in this time of multiplied means 
 to make a Sunday-School interesting and 
 effective, we are in danger of forgetting that 
 the personality of the teachers is the greatest 
 asset. We may have the most approved 
 kindergarten methods for the primary, and 
 may use the most complete and artistic helps 
 in the whole school, and have the best music 
 obtainable; but, unless we have men and 
 women who can teach Jesus Christ and the 
 Christ-life out of the fullness of a firm be- 
 lief and a precious experience, our teaching 
 will be in vain. 
 
 What shall the Church of the future be? 
 Shall it be marked by a deep and thorough 
 
CHILD AND CHURCH 25 
 
 knowledge of the Word of God, by zeal 
 for his Church and his cause, by love for 
 the unregenerate world, and a desire to 
 spread the glad tidings to them? The 
 answer must come from the children of to- 
 day, in the Sunday-School, or out of it now, 
 the baptized members of our Church. How 
 are we training them for the great work 
 whose continuance and expansion must de- 
 pend upon them? 
 
 A little boy, who was taken to church for 
 the first time, was greatly impressed as the 
 choir came in singing, " Onward, Christian 
 soldiers," his favorite hymn. He turned in 
 great excitement to his grandmother and 
 asked, ^'Is that the 'cross of Jesus going on 
 before ' and are those little boys the really 
 truly Christian soldiers ? " 
 
 Yea, verily, and before them lies the bat- 
 tle for righteousness. 
 
Ill 
 
 CHILDREN AND MISSIONS 
 
 THE most fascinating chapters in the 
 history of the Church are those great 
 ones which tell the story of her missionary 
 triumphs. They mark the stages of her 
 growth far more clearly than any chrono- 
 logical record of dogma does. For missions 
 are faith in action, theology vitalized, the 
 continuing witness to the Church Militant. 
 
 The history of the primitive Church is 
 written in the lives and labors of St. Paul, 
 St. Barnabas, and those other sons of the 
 faith, who jostled the world out of its bloody 
 grooves, and taught the gospel of the king- 
 dom of peace. 
 
 The conquest of Christendom was not 
 the work of a year, nor even of a century ; 
 but in those early days, every convert 
 seemed to feel the obligation to missionary 
 effort; and some of them did notable work. 
 In the fourth century we find that the con- 
 
CHILDREN AND MISSIONS 27 
 
 version of the whole kingdom of Iberia 
 (now Asian Georgia) was ascribed to Nino, 
 an Armenian girl. 
 
 The history of the early British Church 
 is a noble chronicle of missionary efforts. 
 From the secluded churches of Scotland 
 and Ireland, the fruit of the labors of St. 
 Patrick and St. Columba, went out compa- 
 nies of missionaries whose '' zeal seemed to 
 take the world by storm." And in the next 
 century we find companies of noble men 
 and women, from the newly evangelized 
 English churches, going over to those Ger- 
 man wilds where Winifred or St. Boniface 
 won his martyr's crown. It has been said of 
 these English companies that " the energy 
 of warriors was exhibited in the enterprise 
 of conversion and teaching." 
 
 Coming down to a later day, we find that 
 missions have played a large part in our own 
 national history; for French Roman Catho- 
 lic missionaries were among those early ex- 
 plorers, who found their journeys "as diffi- 
 cult as the way to heaven." Englishmen also 
 realized that a new country meant a new 
 
28 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 opportunity for preaching the Gospel; and 
 Sir Walter Raleigh gave one hundred 
 pounds " for the propagation of the Chris- 
 tian religion in Virginia." The "Society for 
 the Propagation of the Gospel in New Eng- 
 land and the parts adjacent " was formed in 
 England, and among its missionaries was 
 John Eliot, "the apostle to the Indians"; 
 practical John Eliot, the precursor of the 
 modern missionary, who translated not only 
 the Bible into the Indian tongue, but also a 
 book on logic, that by learning the law of 
 reason the Indians might be better fitted to 
 understand the Scriptures. 
 
 We cannot follow here the thrilling story 
 of the Moravian missions, nor yet of the 
 great awakening of the Church by William 
 Carey, in 1792. Nor need we dwell upon 
 our own time, which has seen the Sandwich 
 Islands Christianized and the Prayer Book 
 translated by their king; has seen Japan 
 take rank as a great power, and witnessed 
 the birth of a Chinese republic, tolerant of 
 Christianity and indebted to it. 
 
 The new life which is stirring the hearts 
 
CHILDREN AND MISSIONS 29 
 
 of Christians to-day is manifested on the 
 mission fields. Schools, hospitals, printing- 
 presses stand side by side with churches. 
 To save men's souls is only part of the work; 
 to save their bodies, which may be "the 
 temple of the Holy Ghost" is seen to be 
 divine service also. We heal and teach these 
 people that when they have been thus as- 
 sured of our sympathetic humanity, they 
 may receive the preaching of our Chris- 
 tianity. 
 
 If now some one asks, " Why do we 
 have missionaries?" we may point to the 
 record of the past; for the Church has grown 
 in power and spirituality as she has awak- 
 ened to the need about her, and taught the 
 truth to others. It is as true of the body 
 spiritual as of the body physical, that it must 
 be exercised if it is to grow. 
 
 As a part of Church history, therefore, 
 needs must that we teach missions to chil- 
 dren; nor should we forget, in presenting 
 the subject, that when Jesus Christ came as 
 a missionary, He came as a little child; and 
 the further fact, that a very large part of our 
 
30 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 work concerns itself with children. These 
 facts help children to relate missions to 
 themselves. 
 
 But the obligation to teach missions is 
 higher than Church history. It follows nat- 
 urally our teaching of the creed as service, 
 of the necessity of patterning our lives after 
 the self-sacrificing life of our Master. Then, 
 when our children have learned to love the 
 Saviour for themselves, it is easy to arouse 
 their interest in people who do not know 
 Him, and to stir their zeal to serve. For in 
 such teaching the child must learn that re- 
 ligion is not a thing for himself alone, but 
 that he is the trustee of a precious treasure 
 to be shared with others. There is a noblesse 
 oblige about missions, and the child who 
 knows the story of the introduction of Chris- 
 tianity to his ancestors, will feel the force of 
 that obligation. He learns vividly from 
 missions, what applied Christianity is, and a 
 new appreciation is awakened in him of that 
 dynamic power of the love of Christ which 
 sends men and women out, at the hazard of 
 their lives, to spread the knowledge of the 
 
CHILDREN AND MISSIONS 31 
 
 love of God. These are the considerations 
 which answer the question, " Why teach 
 missions to children?" For if the Church 
 of the future is to have the missionary 
 spirit, it must be aroused in the children of 
 to-day. 
 
 In presenting the subject of missions to 
 children, manifestly our first duty is to give 
 them a clear and intelligent idea of the con- 
 notation of the terms " missions" and " mis- 
 sionaries"; and to satisfy their inquiries as 
 to the reason why people go on missions, 
 and how we can be said to send them. 
 
 Concrete illustration is the keynote for 
 the teaching of children ; and to teach mis- 
 sions it is well to have "a real live mission- 
 ary" talk to the children, whenever this is 
 possible. For they — and their elders as 
 well — are apt to put all missionaries into 
 the category of strange people, like the peo- 
 ple in a book; and it is a necessary shock 
 for them, to see that these are only every- 
 day men and women, whose great love for 
 Christ is the only extraordinary thing about 
 them. It opens a child's eyes to the possi- 
 
32 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 bilities of service by himself in this direct 
 tion. 
 
 The stories of what missions have done 
 for peoples in other lands, of the social 
 transformations vi^hich they have effected, 
 and their tales of heroism, are fit subjects for 
 children. The annals of any mission station 
 could furnish stirring stories of danger and 
 heroism to-day. Tales of Mackay of the 
 Uganda, or Paton among the cannibals of the 
 New Hebrides, could be told as thrillingly 
 as any dime novel of adventure. Stories of 
 Martyn and Carey, of Judson, ZinzendorfF 
 and Taylor; of the devotion and heroism in 
 persecution of Chinese converts, of the won- 
 derful record of sacrifice and success of Pas- 
 tor Hsi of the China Inland Mission; of 
 Bishop Hare among his Indians, and Bishop 
 Rowe's journeys in Arctic snows; these 
 would interest and inspire boys and girls, 
 young men and maidens. These stories are 
 but an extension of that record of mission- 
 ary heroism and martyrdom given in the 
 acts of the apostles, and the annals of the 
 succeeding centuries ; they show a true apos- 
 
CHILDREN AND MISSIONS 33 
 
 tolic succession of zeal and love and devo- 
 tion. 
 
 The great cause of Christian unity is 
 bound up with missions ; and since the day 
 when John Eliot, at peril of his life under 
 Puritan laws, entertained over night a Jesuit 
 priest from Canada, that he might take 
 counsel with him about the best way of 
 reaching the Indians with the message of 
 the cross, the mission field has been the 
 leader in the breaking down of barriers be- 
 tween Christians. Therefore it is well not 
 to restrict our study to our own Church's 
 missions. Are not all these others also sol- 
 diers of the cross, fighting the good fight, 
 although in a different army corps? And 
 it may follow as a result of such broad 
 teaching that a godly emulation may stir 
 our children to have their own Church un- 
 dertake a larger work and plant her banners 
 on a wider field. 
 
 When this state is reached, that the chil- 
 dren desire to extend the work, then we 
 must teach organization, and acquaint them 
 with the machinery by which the work is 
 
34 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 carried on. Explain the boards of the Church, 
 and the tributary societies, and trace the 
 journey that their dimes and nickels make 
 to the treasury. If possible the teacher 
 should visit the Missions House, and learn 
 how missionaries are chosen and commis- 
 sioned and equipped ; and how supplies are 
 sent out. All this detail is interesting to 
 children, and will make them understand 
 what "contingent expenses" mean, and how 
 real a part of mission work they are. 
 
 There is a story told of a small boy who 
 made his missionary offering somewhat re- 
 luctantly, because he feared that it would 
 all go for " paper and string." We must 
 make it clear to the child, how small a pro- 
 portion of the money goes in that way ; and 
 as paper and string are necessary for the 
 safe carriage of the bundle, so are offices 
 and clerks a necessary part of the machinery 
 which carries on our mission work. 
 
 The privilege, as well as the duty, of giv- 
 ing should be emphasized. On one occa- 
 sion a certain colored preacher addressed 
 his congregation on this subject after this 
 
CHILDREN AND MISSIONS 35 
 
 fashion: "The Lord don't need you, my 
 brethren, to preach the Gospel. He could 
 make the clouds his messengers, and let 
 the winds of heaven carry his message. But 
 He lets you do it; He gives you the privi- 
 lege; and how are you doing it? Just look 
 at your gifts ! " Let us stress our Lord's last 
 command, "Go ye, and preach and bap- 
 tize," as one of the strong, positive, direc- 
 tions for Christian living. 
 
 Now the question arises, can any of this 
 teaching be done in the Sunday-School? 
 At least once a month a short talk of fifteen 
 or twenty minutes might be arranged for, to 
 be given by the rector, superintendent, some 
 teacher or a visitor. Take a different coun- 
 try or theme each month, and tell the chil- 
 dren something of the Church's work there, 
 illustrating it by pictures or curios; and on 
 other Sundays a certain portion of time 
 should be allotted the teachers for class in- 
 struction. 
 
 It will help to impress the smallness of 
 our endeavor for "the people that sit in 
 darkness," if large flags bearing a cross are 
 
36 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 placed on a map of the world, in the Chris- 
 tian countries, and similar tiny ones, at all 
 mission stations in the worid. Statistics help 
 also; so few missionaries to so many millions 
 of people. We must take care to follow the 
 suggestion of the Edinburgh conference, and 
 always allude to these others as non-Chris- 
 tian nations, admitting their good points, 
 yet showing how much they need Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
 In the library should be some missionary 
 books; and the children might be sent to 
 the public library to read up topics for class 
 work. This makes missions seem a part of 
 their necessary knowledge. It is an eye- 
 opener for a child to find an item about 
 missions in the newspaper; it takes missions 
 out of the field of the visionary into the 
 realm of every day. 
 
 Many things may and must happen as a 
 result of interesting children in missions. 
 We shall set before them ideals of life and 
 character, the Christ-life embodied in noble 
 men and women, which may affect their own 
 development. We shall lift them out of the 
 
CHILDREN AND MISSIONS 37 
 
 slough of a materialistic aspect of life, by 
 laying stress on the victories of the spirit; 
 and their faith will be strengthened as they 
 see what that faith has done for others. And 
 not only the foreign world, but our own 
 cities will feel the regenerative effects of this 
 faith, and zeal, and hope, of the children. 
 For we shall emphasize the patriotic aspect 
 of home missions; and since the continuity 
 of good government in a republic depends 
 upon the integrity of its citizens, so the edu- 
 cation and religious training of those citizens, 
 in our cities or in remote districts, is a mat- 
 ter of vital interest to all citizens everywhere. 
 It was to the children that despairing 
 Christendom looked, in the thirteenth cen- 
 tury, to win back the holy sepulcher, hoping 
 that their purity, and zeal, and love, would 
 prove an irresistible force. So they were sent 
 out on the fatal Children's Crusade, inspired, 
 but unprepared. The lesson for us is plain. 
 We must so train and prepare our children, 
 that this awakened army may lead our 
 Church into a realization of her duty, and 
 help her to perform it; and may make unity 
 
38 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 a fact, by the simplicity of their faith, and 
 the singleness of their aim. 
 
 As we look out upon the world of souls, 
 held in the bondage of ignorance of that 
 love divine, let us lay aside all minor differ- 
 ences, that we may rally all our forces for 
 the attack. Let us gather them from home- 
 taught, and Sunday -School -trained, and 
 Church-inspired men and women and chil- 
 dren, as Godfrey de Bouillon gathered his 
 forces from all Christendom ; and then, with 
 a faith and a courage like that of the Cru- 
 saders, let us go forward to the attack, with 
 their battle-cry upon our lips, "God wills 
 it!" 
 
IV 
 
 THE SONG AND THE CHILD 
 
 HAPPY is the child whose life begins 
 with song, for whom the first conscious 
 .sound is his mother's lullaby. For so there 
 is born in his soul the sense of melody and 
 of rhythm, the sense of something beyond 
 the commonplace, and the world becomes 
 to him a world of love ; for his mother's 
 song has mysteriously conveyed his mother's 
 love, and her arms encircle his world. 
 
 For the effect of song is not produced 
 alone by a mere series of nervous responses 
 to stimuli, nor yet by an intellectual appre- 
 ciation of the words, but is also due to the 
 fact, that song is one of the truest ways of 
 expressing that inner self which would other- 
 wise be inarticulate. For into our singing 
 we put our naked souls, rejoicing in the 
 opportunity thus afforded for a self-expression 
 which is to us, and to those who hear us, a 
 self-revelation as well. If a word, as Arch- 
 
40 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 bishop Trench declares, is only "man's 
 thought coming out that it may behold it- 
 self," song is his deepest emotion daring to 
 express itself, and we know the singer as we 
 could not without his song. 
 
 *'Four parts of the speech," wrote a col- 
 ored man in a civil service examination, 
 " are laughing, crying, talking, and singing ";. 
 and his fundamental philosophy was not far 
 wrong, although he strayed far from the paths 
 of grammar. The happy little child as he 
 skips along puts into song — which is the 
 rhythmic motion of words — his feelings, 
 his experiences, and even the news of the 
 day. The boy of later age may sing senti- 
 mental college songs ; but, for fear least they 
 betray his real self, he adds a rollicking and 
 inappropriate chorus. 
 
 The patriotism of nations finds expression 
 in their songs; the French Revolution cen- 
 tered around the " Marseillaise " and it will 
 yet stir patriotism to fever pitch. The Ger- 
 man Revolution of 1848 became cohesive 
 and effective because the patriotic songs of 
 the group of poets, of whom Korner was a 
 
SONG AND THE CHILD 41 
 
 leader, had prepared the hearts of the peo- 
 ple ; and " Die Wacht am Rhein" has united 
 the German Empire. 
 
 There is an inarticulate devotion which 
 finds expression in song, in hymns, which 
 St. Augustine defined as "praise to God 
 with song." It has been noted by historical 
 students that religion flourished best when 
 men sang most; and this is so, because the 
 religious feehngs of the race, which are its 
 profoundest emotions, have from the earliest 
 times expressed themselves most easily in 
 song. This was true in ancient Egypt; in 
 the ancient Chaldean worship of Abraham's 
 time, when song formed an important part 
 of the temple ritual. TertuUian relates that, 
 at the love feasts of the early Church, each 
 man was invited to come forward and sing 
 to God's praise something either taken from 
 Scripture or of his own composition. " One 
 might hear," writes St. Jerome about a.d. 
 420, " the ploughman at his hallelujahs, the 
 mower at his hymns, and the vine-dresser 
 singing David's psalms." 
 
 It was the songs of the Reformation that 
 
42 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 popularized it, and Heine called Luther's 
 great hymn, "A mighty fortress is our 
 God," the "Marseillaise of the Reformation." 
 In restoring congregational singing, "for the 
 comfort of such as delight in music," Queen 
 Elizabeth stipulated that the hymns should 
 be "in the best sort of music that may be 
 conveniently devised, having respect that 
 the sentence [i.e., sense] of hymns be under- 
 standed and perceived." 
 
 The beautiful hymns of Charles Wesley 
 sang the Gospel into many hearts, and did 
 much for the success of the great Wesleyan 
 movement. In all ages religious music has 
 seemed the spontaneous outburst of praise; 
 its ordered movement meant uniformity of 
 worship, instead of individual cries and ap- 
 peals; the musical tones expressed a deeper 
 fervor than the words alone could convey; 
 and something of that "divine afflatus" 
 which possessed the composer of the hymn 
 stirred the hearts of those who joined in the 
 singing. For whether it be by means of 
 solemn "De Profundis"or triumphant "Te 
 Deum," our stoniest griefs dissolve in music, 
 
SONG AND THE CHILD 43 
 
 and our thoughts rise to rapture on the 
 wings of song. 
 
 Song has served many uses ; it has uttered 
 the miseries of captives in Babylon, and its 
 epithalamions have greeted happy brides. 
 It has nerved men for battle and crowned 
 their victories. The stern soldiers of Crom- 
 well's armies went into battle singing psalms; 
 and after the victory of Agincourt the Eng- 
 lish army voiced its thanksgiving by sing- 
 ing Psalms 114 and 115. Song has even 
 been used controversially, and in the time 
 of St. John Chrysostom the streets of Con- 
 stantinople were enlivened by bands of the 
 adherents of Arius singing the light hymns 
 by which he was popularizing his doctrine, 
 and then by great ceremonial processions of 
 choirs singing the stately hymns of the 
 Church. The riots which ensued put an end 
 to this musical propaganda. 
 
 Song has a distinct pedagogic value, for 
 words set to music are riveted in the mem- 
 ory by the double hold of sense and 
 rhythm. 
 
 It is because of its tremendous potential 
 
44 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 effect that a ribald song seems worse than 
 wicked words, for its influence will last 
 longer. "Let me make the songs of a na- 
 tion, and I care not who makes its laws," 
 said the great De Medici ; and the first indi- 
 cation of a reformation, either national or 
 individual, is a change of song. ^'As a man 
 thinketh in his heart, so is he," says the 
 proverb ; it is equally true that as a man 
 sings, so is he really, for the songs that he 
 sings are his true moral index. 
 
 These are the considerations that give song 
 such an important place In the education 
 of the child. The truth may be so inefface- 
 ably impressed upon his mind and heart by 
 the songs that he sings in childhood, that 
 later doubts can never shake his faith in 
 the divinity and presence of Christ; and al- 
 though he may seem to scoff, in his mem- 
 ory there must linger the feelings of the 
 child as he sang, — 
 
 ** I think when I read that sweet story of old. 
 When Jesus was here among men." 
 
 And the last day alone will reveal how many 
 
SONG AND THE CHILD 45 
 
 souls have been sung into the kingdom of 
 heaven. 
 
 These facts impose a grave responsibility 
 upon all who are concerned in the education 
 of the child. For the expanding heart of the 
 child will find expression in song, and it is 
 our privilege to choose the vehicle for that 
 expression, to determine the character of 
 his songs. 
 
 It is a mistake to think that a child must 
 be taught only light airs and words ; chil- 
 dren are often extremely fond of minor 
 keys, as though pleased by the contrast 
 with their own moods, and all children are 
 naturally religious. They are in such a 
 mysterious world ; they are so used to the 
 fact that they cannot understand everything; 
 they feel so keenly their littleness and need 
 of protection, — that it is easy for them to 
 accept and rejoice in the possession of a 
 heavenly Father and an invisible but per- 
 sonal Saviour. Here, then, is our problem, 
 no less than our opportunity. All around 
 him the child hears the lively airs, and 
 lighter words, of the popular music of the 
 
46 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 day ; and it is sad, indeed, to hear the tri- 
 fling and cheap music of the street on the 
 lips of little ones whose sweet child souls 
 still bear the heavenly impress. How can 
 we give them something that shall displace 
 light airs by good music, and light words, 
 by those of beauty and simple devotion? 
 
 In the earlier days of the Sunday-Schools, 
 there were no hymns for children, and they 
 sang the same hymns that their elders did. 
 Then a few attempts were made to write 
 hymns for children. Some of these older at- 
 tempts would be amusing, if one did not 
 reflect upon the evidence they afford of a 
 wasted opportunity. From an old song- 
 book of sixty years ago comes this hymn: — 
 
 *' As Robert Raikes walked out one day. 
 He saw some little boys at play. 
 Upon the holy Sabbath Day, 
 Aplaying, playing, away. 
 Then away, away, we can't wait any longer. 
 Away to the Sunday-School.*' 
 
 This may be an historical statement, but 
 
 can hardly be classed as a devotional hymn. 
 
 From a Sunday-School hymn book pub- 
 
SONG AND THE CHILD 47 
 
 Ushed thirty-five years ago, we get the fol- 
 lowing specimens : — 
 
 '* Rosy cheeks will pass away. 
 Pearly teeth will soon decay." 
 
 Would not every child who sang that 
 couplet instinctively think of the dentist, 
 and forget the moral lesson with which the 
 hymn ended ? 
 
 The second selection is even worse : — 
 
 ** Ring the bell softly. 
 There's crape on the door.** 
 
 Imagine a crowd of happy children singing 
 that song as an act of worship ! 
 
 There is now an abundance of good 
 hymns for children; but in addition to 
 them we may well teach the great hymns 
 of the Church, and their history. Would it 
 not awaken in the child a sense of the con- 
 tinuity of devotion to know that our "Glo- 
 ria in Excelsis " was the early Greek "morn- 
 ing hymn," and has been used in Rome 
 since the time of the Emperor Hadrian? 
 He would sing the " Te Deum " with awe, 
 if he knew that it had expressed the praise 
 
48 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 of Christian congregations since the fifth 
 century, and that it was associated with the 
 conversion of St. Augustine. " The voices 
 flowed into my ears; the truth distilled into 
 my heart : I overflowed with devout affec- 
 tions, and was happy." So wrote the great 
 doctor of the Church. 
 
 The Crusaders would step down from 
 their historic niches, and become real to him, 
 as he imagined the Red Cross knights sing- 
 ing, on a spring morning, in Palestine, the 
 beautiful "Crusaders' Hymn": — 
 
 ** Fair are the meadows, - 
 
 Fairer still the woodlands. 
 
 Robed in the blooming garb of Spring: 
 
 Jesus is fairer, 
 
 Jesus is purer. 
 
 Who makes the woeful heart to sing." 
 
 Tell the child the story of Martin Luther 
 in the Castle of the Wartburg, wrestling 
 with temptation in such real fashion that he 
 threw his inkstand at the wall, to crush the 
 devil who seemed so real and so near. As 
 the child remembered the ink-spot on the 
 wall, he would appreciate the lines of the 
 great battle hymn of that strenuous soul : — 
 
SONG AND THE CHILD 49 
 
 «• And though this world with devils filled 
 Should threaten to undo us ; 
 We will not fear, for God has willed 
 His truth to triumph through us.** 
 
 Such stories would make history and religion 
 vital and human to the child ; and enable him 
 to fuse present need and aspirations with the 
 longings and struggles of the past. 
 
 In order that hymns may reach their high- 
 est usefulness with the child, they should be 
 clearly explained to him. A New England 
 grandmother once told me that as a little 
 child at church, she was much puzzled to 
 hear the congregation sing, — as she 
 thought, — 
 
 **Lord, how delightful 'tis to see 
 A whole assembly wash up Thee." 
 
 The idea shocked her sense of reverence, 
 but, child-like, she did not mention her per- 
 plexity to her elders; and it was only when 
 she covild read that she was relieved to find 
 that the hymn really said : — 
 
 *'Lord, how delightful 'tis to see 
 A whole assembly worship Thee," 
 
 Another child thought for many years 
 
50 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 that " haven guide *' was a place, since the 
 line seemed to be sung, — 
 
 ** Safe into the Havenguidc. " 
 
 At another time this same child, unaware 
 that many kinds of words may be set to 
 hymn music, became much excited at hear- 
 ing the congregation singing the familiar 
 tune of "Greenville," and turning to her 
 mother exclaimed in a tragic whisper, " Oh, 
 mother, they 're singing 
 
 "'Go tell Aunt Sally 
 
 The old gray goose is dead,* 
 
 and it 's in church ! " 
 
 The appropriateness of the sentiment to 
 the child's mind and feelings, should also 
 be considered, if song is to be more than a 
 musical exercise for the child. Not only must 
 he understand what he sings, but he must 
 feel the truth of it ; his devotion will never 
 become articulate by singing songs whose 
 sentiments he does not share. In the full 
 flush of youth and its enjoyments, he does 
 not find "earth a desert drear"; nor does 
 he feel heaven to be his only home, when 
 
SONG AND THE CHILD 51 
 
 experiencing the loving care of father and 
 mother : nor is he apt to sigh, " O Paradise, 
 O Paradise, who doth not crave for rest," 
 while every nerve tingles with the fun of a 
 ball game. " Fight the good fight," he can 
 easily understand, for he is playing games 
 to win; and "Onward, Christian soldiers,*' 
 stirs every child's imagination with its call 
 to activity. Most children love the intimate 
 picturesqueness of " O little town of Beth- 
 lehem," and " Joy to the world " and " Hark, 
 the herald angels sing," give him that joy 
 of real self-expression which all song should 
 afford. 
 
 It would mean much to our children if 
 they always understood what they sang so 
 well that it really voiced their own emo- 
 tions; for song would then do a double 
 work upon them. Their souls and minds 
 would be left in a state receptive to devout 
 influences; they would be so attuned to the 
 rest of the service that inattention would be 
 minimized, and reverence increased; and 
 the seed sown in such good ground would 
 bear fruit an hundredfold. 
 
52 A CHILD^S RELIGION 
 
 There is yet another consideration : song 
 is one of the hinges on which memory turns 
 her records ; so let the child have the exam- 
 ple of the elders in singing, that in later 
 years he may remember, "This was my 
 father's favorite hymn"; " My mother loved 
 that hymn." Let him carry in his memory 
 the full-hearted way in which the congrega- 
 tion joined the choir in singing the " Mag- 
 nificat *' or the great " Te Deum," the " Ben- 
 edictus," the " Venite " and " Nunc Dimittis." 
 Give him these splendid examples, and he 
 will feel that "the praise of God in song" is 
 the most natural thing in the world. 
 
 There is, moreover, a beautiful comrade- 
 ship in song; it is one of the blessed ties 
 "that bind our hearts in Christian love." I 
 can still remember the curious feeling that 
 possessed me, when, as a child, I discovered 
 that many well-known hymns did not belong 
 to any one group of worshipers; but that 
 Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Presby- 
 terians, Baptists, and Methodists all sang 
 them. And great was my astonishment to 
 learn that Roman Catholics also sang the 
 
SONG AND THE CHILD S3 
 
 " Venite Adoremus." And then, although I 
 was too young to know Church history, my 
 eyes were opened to a great truth, and there 
 came to me a glimpse of what the real unity 
 of Christendom was; and there arose a great 
 longing that the time might come when in 
 the great essentials we should all be one. 
 
 "Hymnody," says the Right Honorable, 
 the Earl of Selborne, "has embodied the 
 faith, trust, and hope, and no small part of 
 the inward experience of generation after 
 generation of men, in many different coun- 
 tries and climates, of many different nations, 
 and in many varieties of circumstances and 
 conditions. ... It bears witness to the force 
 of a central attraction more powerful than 
 all causes of difference, which binds together 
 times ancient and modern, nations of vari- 
 ous races and languages. Churchman and 
 nonconformist, churches reformed and un- 
 reformed : to a true fundamental unity among 
 good Christians; and to a substantial iden- 
 tity in their moral and spiritual experiences." 
 
 This is the heritage which we open for 
 the child by the judicious selection, and 
 
54 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 intelligent teaching, of the hymns of the 
 Church; this is the great company of the 
 faithful into which he enters by the gate of 
 song; and he feels the sense of comradeship 
 with the strong and earnest souls of all ages. 
 " Earth with her thousand voices praises 
 God/* sang the poet. The older ecclesiastical 
 artists put into the hands of the angels and 
 cherubim, in their pictures, musical instru- 
 ments of wood and silver and other mate- 
 rials ; because, as they quaintly thought, the 
 dumb trees and rocks wanted to praise God, 
 and could only do so by being made into 
 instruments of music. The soul of the child 
 is likewise struggling to express itself; let 
 us put into his heart the songs that shall 
 liberate that expression. 
 
THE CHILD AND HIS BOOK 
 
 IN the Congressional Library there is a 
 beautiful series of lunettes by Alexander, 
 representing the history of the book. The 
 series begins with a picture of men piling 
 up stones to form a memorial cairn, like that 
 at Gilgal which marked the Jordan crossing, 
 and was intended to start inquiry among 
 children's children, and to furnish notes in 
 stone for the future story-tellers. And in the 
 next picture one sees an Arab wise man, sur- 
 rounded by a group of desert listeners, to 
 whom he is recounting the stories of the 
 tribe. Then follows the Indian painting his 
 pictographs on a skin ; and then the monu- 
 mental hieroglyphs of Egypt. The series 
 draws to a close with the patient monk, toil- 
 ing with brush and pen over his illuminated 
 manuscript; and reaches its splendid cul- 
 mination in that press of Gutenberg which 
 gave wings to thought 
 
56 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 And as one remembers also that savage 
 who was wont to scratch his thoughts on a 
 beech leaf, and meditates on this strange 
 story of a book, the question arises. What 
 impulse has stirred men, what desire for 
 remembrance has prompted them, savage 
 and civilized alike, to strive in these various 
 ways to perpetuate the deeds and thoughts 
 of their time? It seems as if it expressed a 
 striving of the soul that felt itself immortal, 
 and struggled to express its immortality. 
 
 This is, however, mere speculation; yet 
 by all these evolutions in the art of preserv- 
 ing thought, the growing self-consciousness 
 of the race has developed. Men wrote, at 
 first, of battles and dynasties; then hymns 
 of worship ; and then of the thoughts, ex- 
 periences, and emotions which are common 
 to all men. And the only books which were 
 great enough to come down to us are those 
 which interpreted most truly the universal 
 life of men. 
 
 In our own age the advanced self-con- 
 sciousness of the race expresses itself in 
 books which describe with minuteness every 
 
CHILD AND HIS BOOK 57 
 
 phase of life, and analyze with scalpel-like 
 keenness ''the thoughts and intents of the 
 heart." The last discovery in science fur- 
 nishes materials for our novels, and the most 
 awful disaster is speedily expanded into 
 many volumes. The four quarters of the 
 globe are investigated and described for our 
 delectation, and no effort is spared to inform 
 and amuse mankind. 
 
 Among its many other names, this age 
 has been called the "Era of the Printed 
 Page " ; and it is preeminently so, since we 
 even write in type. In old China men used 
 to go around the streets to gather waste 
 papers, with the cry, "Revere and spare the 
 printed paper." Back of the cry there lies a 
 hint of the mystery of printing, that strange 
 magic which enables arbitrary symbols to 
 convey and preserve for us those psychic 
 processes of other minds which we call 
 thoughts. But the multiplicity of printing- 
 presses has destroyed the reverence for the 
 printed paper; except, perhaps, among chil- 
 dren. For them something of the mystery 
 still lingers. 
 
58 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 Some years ago it was the fashion to give 
 lists of the hundred best books, according 
 to popular vote or to the dictum of distin- 
 guished men. Then we have lists of the 
 books that have helped. Rarely did a list 
 of the hundred worst books appear, nor did 
 any distinguished or undistinguished person 
 confess which were the books that had hurt 
 him. For most people know that books are 
 fruitful sources of those "evil thoughts which 
 may assault and hurt the soul." Books arc 
 incarnated thought, and one may be helped 
 or hurt by contact with a book as with a 
 person. 
 
 This is preeminently true of children. 
 '' Where did you hear of such a thing ? '* 
 you ask a child, and he solemnly replies, 
 " I read it in a book " ; and that fact settles 
 its truthfulness for him. " Why did you do 
 so and so?" and he answers, "The boy did 
 so in the book I just read," and that seems 
 to him a sufficient explanation. It was an 
 objection often urged against a certain class 
 of books, common a generation ago, that all 
 the good children died; and there were 
 
CHILD AND HIS BOOK 59 
 
 doubtless many boys and girls in whom the 
 love of life was so strong that they resolved 
 not to be too good in order that they might 
 remain alive. 
 
 It is evident, then, that especially to chil- 
 dren books are very important things; for 
 the child sees life through the books that he 
 reads, and his ideas are formed, his desires 
 stimulated, and his standards of morality 
 influenced and partly formed by books. The 
 recognition of this fact has led to the publi- 
 cation of books for children on a wide range 
 of topics. All the tablets of knowledge are 
 sugar-coated for them, and they travel toward 
 learning over a macadamized road, in a 
 rubber-tired touring car, without much effort 
 on their own part. Many of these books are 
 admirable in tone and teaching, while some 
 lay so much stress on cleverness that they 
 seem to regard it as permissible for the hero 
 to lie and steal in order to gain his end ; and 
 such books must be classed as unmoral, if 
 not immoral. 
 
 Since books so greatly influence the child 
 mind, there is surely a need that the Church, 
 
6o A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 which is trying to train him for God, should 
 see to it that the right sort of mental food 
 is supplied to him. 
 
 In judging a child's book there are two 
 things that must be considered: Is it such 
 a book as a child ought to read; that is, 
 will its influence be helpful in the nurture 
 of the young personality? And is it so writ- 
 ten that a child will want to read it, or have 
 it read to him? The answer to the first 
 question establishes a standard below which 
 it must not fall; the second fixes the stand- 
 ard which it must reach in order to be suc- 
 cessful: the adult makes the first; the child, 
 the second. 
 
 The adult insists that the child's book 
 shall be distinctly moral in tone, that it shall 
 emphasize the good in life, and shall fur- 
 nish the child with suitable models for his 
 own behavior. For children, even to-day, 
 are mentally like the peasant folk of the 
 Middle Ages, for whom mystery and mir- 
 acle plays were acted, that they might have 
 concrete illustrations of the virtues and see 
 the punishment meted out to wickedness. 
 
CHILD AND HIS BOOK 6i 
 
 It is also required that the illustrations shall 
 help the child to understand the story; and 
 that, artistically, they too shall be moral, and 
 teach truth in form and beauty in expres- 
 sion and idea; that so they may furnish 
 suitable mental pictures for the child. 
 
 Any one who knows children is aware of 
 the keenness of their critical powers, and 
 the sureness of their likes and dislikes; and 
 their decisions are as prompt and irrevocable 
 about books as about people. No amount of 
 argument can persuade a child to like a book 
 if he has once decided that it does not reach 
 his unformulated, and, perhaps, uncon- 
 scious standard. 
 
 And what does a child demand in a book ? 
 
 Curled up in an easy-chair with his book 
 upon his lap, one sees the child so absorbed 
 in his story that he is oblivious to everything 
 else ; the sun shines over him, the birds are 
 calling outside, but he heeds not. What can 
 hold a child so closely ? He has found a book 
 that stirs his imagination by its vivid picturing 
 of historic deeds, or its beguiling recital of 
 strange adventures in unknown lands, or its 
 
62 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 fantastic conceits of things and life in the un- 
 known and unseen regions of fancy, or its 
 realistic stories of the doings of boys and 
 girls situated like himself 
 
 Sometimes the author of the book has 
 *' made things lively by making them local," 
 to quote Chesterton's phrase, and all young- 
 sters delight in such localization. He is fond 
 of fairy stories pure and simple; for to him 
 dwarfs and gnomes, brownies, pixies, elves, 
 and nymphs are just as credible personages 
 as Abyssinians or Thibetans, Maoris, Zulus, 
 or any other people beyond his acquaintance. 
 It is all one to the child; world-conscious- 
 ness is dawning or nascent, hot yet devel- 
 oped, and to him all stories belong in the 
 same category. 
 
 He is keen to detect any discrepancies 
 between the descriptions and the illustrations 
 of a book ; for in his book he demands truth, 
 as well as an appeal to the imagination and 
 a story told in a human way. He wants his 
 story with clear-cut outlines, in distinct blacks 
 and whites, without any shadowy dimness of 
 characters, or gray shadings of moral actions. 
 
CHILD AND HIS BOOK 63 
 
 The child is critical of style, and a story 
 told in language that is "simple to the verge 
 of baldness" is not acceptable to him. He 
 likes a few words that he cannot understand, 
 but must reach after — for do not the grown- 
 ups consult the dictionary? — and he feels the 
 thrill of aconscious acquisition of knowledge 
 when he must inquire about a word. Abso- 
 lute novelty of subject is not necessary; for, 
 if given a dress in the language of to-day, 
 the age-old stories will charm children now 
 as they have through all the centuries. 
 
 Fundamentally there is but one demand ; 
 the story must be so furnished with familiar 
 detail that the child can relate it to his own 
 life, and so make it seem real. This furnishes 
 the justification for good historical fiction; it 
 teaches the child in a most impressive way 
 the events and characters of history, so that 
 he can feel the time and appreciate the situ- 
 ations. In , a Sunday-School library such 
 works would be especially helpful in vitaliz- 
 ing the characters of early Church history, and 
 would make saints and martyrs and fathers 
 companionable to the youth of to-day. 
 
64 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 To sum up the matter briefly, then, the 
 books in a Sunday-School library must be 
 such as a child will read. To have a boy 
 condemn a book as "stuffy," or "pious," is 
 enough to kill his interest for many years 
 in the subject of which it treats. So our books 
 on missions, on Church history, on general 
 morals, on everyday Christian living, must 
 conform to the standard established by 
 childhood, if they are to serve any useful 
 moral purpose. 
 
 The question is often asked, Is it neces- 
 sary to have a Sunday-School library if there 
 is a good town library ? In schools composed 
 of prosperous families the need may not be 
 so great ; but among the poorer classes it is 
 imperative. For these lack the initiative to 
 procure library cards, and often the carfare to 
 and from the library is an important item in 
 the family expenditures. But even under the 
 most favorable circumstances the need ex- 
 ists. A library supplies a part of the educa- 
 tion which the Church is providing for the 
 child; by means of its well-chosen books 
 she strives to impress upon the child the 
 
CHILD AND HIS BOOK 65 
 
 lessons taught in class; and she seeks to 
 provide tor that soul-culture, which is our 
 chief concern, by furnishing books that shall 
 help, not hurt, the tender and impressionable 
 mind. Associational values are large in chil- 
 dren, and to a child who loves his Sunday- 
 School, the books from its library bring a 
 special message. 
 
 There is, moreover, the further fact to be 
 considered, that in many of the poorer 
 families the Sunday-School book furnishes 
 reading for the whole family. 
 
 This brings us to another phase of the 
 question, namely, the cooperation of the 
 home; the child is imitative, and is apt to 
 affect the reading of his elders. And thus it 
 happens that "What do the grown-ups 
 read?" becomes a vital question. For read- 
 ing affects the soul-culture of the adult 
 almost as much as it does that of the child. 
 We are discriminating about the lectures 
 we hear, and the plays that we attend, and 
 exceedingly critical about the sermons to 
 which we listen. Are we careful enough 
 about what we read, and its effect upon us? 
 
6S A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 It seems a simple rule that we should ask 
 ourselves what we expect to gain from our 
 reading. If one would grow wise, he reads 
 wise books; if he wishes to become expert 
 in any branch of knowledge, he confines his 
 reading to technical books. Ifwe take our 
 Christian life seriously, should we not give 
 attention to such reading as shall make us 
 and our children grow " in wisdom and in 
 favor with God and man " ? For from books 
 we absorb into our thinking the thoughts of 
 others, and " as a man thinketh in his heart, 
 so is he." 
 
VI 
 
 ON TELLING BIBLE STORIES 
 
 THE persistent survival of certain traits 
 of human nature, through all the 
 changing and advancing centuries, is a con- 
 tinual source of amazement. Grown men 
 gather now at club or banquet, in smok- 
 ing-car or country store, around a good story- 
 teller, just as eagerly as they did when all 
 knowledge came to them orally. The child 
 of to-day, overwhelmed as he is by children's 
 books, is as insistent in his demands for a 
 story as any little half-naked-savage was in 
 times gone by. Every person, be he parent, 
 teacher, friend, or relation, who comes into 
 close personal contact with a little child, 
 must expect to hear the request, "Please 
 tell me a story"; and unless he can gratify 
 the wish, he may expect to fall in the scale 
 of the child's appreciation. 
 
 The story is such a universally desired 
 thing that teachers of all ages and races 
 
68 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 have used it as a means for conveying truth 
 in palatable form. It can teach history in 
 unforgettable pictures ; and righteousness 
 may be exalted, and virtue become triumph- 
 ant, and the homely abstract virtues be em- 
 phasized by concrete personification, in the 
 tale that the wise story-teller unfolds to 
 gratify this desire of his hearers. 
 
 To meet a demand so full of opportunity 
 and so certain to be made upon each of us, 
 requires some preparation on our part; for 
 it is not easy for every one to tell stories, 
 since the inventive faculty, the fluent tongue, 
 and the ability to catch the child's point of 
 view are not equally bestowed upon us. 
 
 Many books have been written to help 
 people who desire to study the subject, sug- 
 gesting themes and methods. It should be 
 noted that, while the child likes any story, 
 one that is a " true story " is his especial fa- 
 vorite. This requirement is easily met by 
 the stories of the Bible ; and they have an 
 additional claim upon our notice, because, as 
 examples of the short story, there is nothing 
 in any literature to compare with the short 
 
TELLING BIBLE STORIES 6g 
 
 stories of the Bible. The characters are so 
 human, the recital is so brief and dramatic, 
 the lesson is so truly pointed that they serve 
 their high moral purpose now, as well as they 
 did when they were first told to eager lis- 
 teners or read by studious youth. Let us 
 attempt to analyze the art of these old story- 
 tellers, and try to catch the secret of their 
 charm. 
 
 These stories show an intimate acquaint- 
 ance with human nature, and this gives 
 them their perennial freshness ; for human 
 nature has not changed much in the long 
 years that stretch between Abraham's time 
 and ours: its great moving passions and 
 joys and sorrows have known no change, 
 even as they know no nationality. And so 
 to tell these stories well, we must put into 
 them all that comprehension of human 
 nature which experience has taught us. 
 We must analyze the motives for the actions 
 described, and point out their inevitable 
 moral effect. The characters must be real 
 to us, or they can never walk out of the im- 
 prisonment of archaic text and become "real 
 
70 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 live heroes" for the children. In every pos- 
 sible way we must vitalize our story by the 
 use of imagination based upon informa- 
 tion. 
 
 For these old writers knew their "local 
 coloring," and we must reproduce it by 
 study. Any one who wishes her telling of 
 Bible stories to reach the point of extreme 
 usefulness should cultivate a thorough ac- 
 quaintance with facts about the history of 
 the times, the geography of the places, and 
 the customs of the countries where the story 
 is laid. This knowledge will furnish the 
 proper food for the imagination. 
 
 These old writers used an abundance 
 of detail, introduced in brief sentences of 
 much discernment. They indulged in a re- 
 iteration which children love, as it gives a 
 sort of pendulum effect and heightens the 
 interest for the climax. 
 
 One is impressed by the fact that these 
 writers believed their stories to be true, and 
 knew that they had a distinct value histori- 
 cally as well as morally; they were not told 
 merely to amuse. They had a purpose in 
 
TELLING BIBLE STORIES 71 
 
 telling their stories; for they aimed to 
 show " the third and fourth generation " 
 how God had punished and rewarded, 
 and to read into every event of history the 
 moving hand of Jehovah. 
 
 To tell Bible stories well, we need such 
 a thorough acquaintance with the text that 
 we can put the story into our own language; 
 although it is possible to interest quite 
 young children in the stories as they are 
 read from the Bible, with only a running 
 word of explanation here and there. This, 
 however, depends very largely upon the 
 reader. Some people, in reading the Bible 
 aloud, read only the words ; others read the 
 ideas as well, and then the story makes its 
 own appeal ; for the comprehension of the 
 reader has been imparted to the hearer. 
 
 "Study your Bible on your knees," ad- 
 vised Mr. Moody; and then, we would add, 
 go to the libraries and study about it. Learn 
 what the spade of the archseologist has found, 
 and what the skill of the patient linguistic 
 scholar has deciphered and deduced for our 
 benefit. For we need to know the back- 
 
72 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 grounds of our story, and these are ex- 
 tremely interesting as they have been dis- 
 closed by recent discoveries and studies. 
 We cannot tell effectively these tales of a 
 great people unless their history is real to 
 us. For a people in whose life there was 
 a forty years' desert wandering, and into 
 whose soul the iron of a seventy years' 
 Babylonian Captivity had entered, was in- 
 deed "peculiar." A knowledge of Great 
 Babylon, its manners, customs, and religion, 
 and the kings who ruled it and captive 
 Israel, is necessary if we would understand 
 the Books of Esther and Daniel, and much 
 of the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah. And 
 the Egypt of Moses, Joseph, and Jeremiah 
 is surely an interesting theme. 
 
 This knowledge will not always find 
 definite place in our stories, but it will color 
 them, and so will help to give the child the 
 correct impression; and also, by putting the 
 stories in their proper historical relation, will 
 emphasize their moral lesson. 
 
 For it is our privilege to show the children 
 that these stories belong to the present and 
 
TELLING BIBLE STORIES 73 
 
 set standards for their own conduct. We 
 must definitely relate the truths that they 
 teach to the vexations, the difficulties, the 
 temptations, the open or covert infidelity, 
 which the children will surely meet in life.* 
 For these boys and girls are not going to 
 live in secluded Christian communities like 
 cloistered brotherhoods and sisterhoods, but 
 out in the thick of affairs, in a world bent 
 on other things ; in the midst of a hurrying 
 life seeking its own ends; amid comrades 
 scoffing or lightly contemptuous of anything 
 serious — the world where they must strug- 
 gle to follow after good. 
 
 Unless we can so vitalize the stories that 
 they shall be connected with the child's own 
 life, they fail in our hands. A little fellow 
 who had been taught Bible stories was play- 
 fully chasing his aunt, and gleefully called 
 out, " Look out, if I catch you I '11 swallow 
 you like the whale did Jonah ! " He was too 
 young to get much moral value from the 
 story of Jonah, but he had grasped one fact ; 
 Jonah was a real man, and things could 
 happen to Jonah just as they did to him. 
 
74 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 Jonah had been taken from the pedestal of 
 observation and history, and made a part 
 of his daily life. 
 
 Often the children themselves will be our 
 best teachers in the story-telling art. The 
 story of Moses in the bulrushes had been 
 told to a little four-year-old girl by her aunt ; 
 and afterwards, to see how much the child 
 had understood, the aunt invited the little 
 one to tell her the story back again. The 
 recital went quite smoothly until it reached 
 the place where Miriam offers to get a nurse 
 for the baby, when Four-years-old enlarged 
 on the incident in this fashion: "Oh! I'll 
 get you a nurse for the baby; she '11 be a 
 nice, pretty nurse ; and she '11 be so good to 
 the baby." Her acquaintance with the nursery 
 had given her a standard for the qualifica- 
 tions of a nurse that had escaped her aunt. 
 
 As an illustration of the child's love of 
 detail, we may mention the small girl, who, 
 upon reading that Job's wealth was doubled 
 after his trial, took great pleasure in com- 
 paring the exact number of sheep and camels 
 and asses and oxen which belonged to Job 
 
TELLING BIBLE STORIES 75 
 
 before and after that event. Properly told, 
 the story of the Tabernacle and of the build- 
 ing of Solomon's Temple will fascinate chil- 
 dren; while the story of Esther, with its 
 wealth of suggested detail, is a treasure 
 mine. 
 
 It is a matter of importance that we, like 
 the Bible writers, believe the stories which 
 we tell to the children ; for these keen young 
 people will know, from our tones and un- 
 conscious attitude toward the story, whether 
 we believe it or not. 
 
 The fact of miracles troubles some people 
 in accepting the stories of the Bible, and 
 consequently in relating them. In the light 
 of the scientific attitude of to-day, that should 
 no longer trouble any one. There is not a 
 miracle recorded in the Bible that is more 
 incredible to us than some of the achieve- 
 ments of to-day would have seemed to peo- 
 ple a hundred years ago. Could the men of 
 Marlborough's time have been told of battles 
 in the air fought wath machine guns, of sub- 
 marine warfare, of smokeless powder, and 
 of the deadly achievements of liquid fire and 
 
76 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 poisonous gas on battle-fields and in trenches, 
 it would have staggered their credulity. Or 
 had they been told of sending the human 
 voice over forty-six hundred miles from New 
 York to Hawaii; or of sending pictures by 
 electricity, they would have been skeptically 
 amazed. Science now concedes that miracles 
 are possible, and that we may not yet have 
 discovered the laws which underlie them. 
 We no longer think that we have penetrated 
 all the secrets of the universe, or that all the 
 laws of creation are scheduled in our text- 
 books. Such being the case, it seems reason- 
 able to accept the statements of the old writ- 
 ers, and wait for fuller knowledge for the 
 explanation. The age of science is ushering 
 in the age of faith; and the conquest or 
 utilization of the invisible universe makes 
 easy the belief in the unseen God. 
 
 Here the little child may well lead us, for 
 to him miracle is always possible, since all 
 life is for him the progressive unfolding of 
 mysteries. 
 
 The telling of Bible stories is therefore an 
 unique art. It is not the mere art of amusing 
 
TELLING BIBLE STORIES 77 
 
 the child, nqr the mere quieting of his de- 
 mands; it is not confined even to the stim- 
 ulating of his imagination, nor the setting 
 before him of inspiring models of the virtues, 
 and warning personifications of the vices. 
 But with all these there goes a deeper result. 
 Only these stories link him with the other 
 world, with the great supreme powers, and 
 put his growing soul into its correct relation 
 with its Creator. Hence these stories teach 
 religion, for that, in its simplest form, is the 
 binding of the soul to God. 
 
 All knowledge must be preceded by in- 
 terest, say the psychologists; and so these 
 wonderful stories furnish us with the correct 
 and incomparable means for imparting truth. 
 
 To the conscientious teller of Bible stories 
 there comes a great reward. For the prep- 
 aration of mind and spirit, by study and 
 prayer, brings an increased sense of the 
 wholeness of that brief chronicle of man's 
 long search after God and of the fullness of 
 the revelation made to him. Equipped with 
 this knowledge, the story-teller will be en- 
 abled to explain great doctrines naturally 
 
78 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 and simply. Full of information, not only 
 about each story, but of the great subject in 
 all its bearings, the teaching will hold the 
 attention, and the dealings of the Spirit will 
 become understood in their relations to pro- 
 saic everyday conditions and individual 
 needs. 
 
 Our own faith will revive and grow, and 
 our own souls will be fed at the same sources 
 from which we draw for the child. 
 
 " He taught the people by parables." Is 
 it not good to follow in his steps? 
 
VII 
 
 A SUNDAY-SCHOOLTEACHER'S BIOGRAPHY 
 
 WE learn but slowly from the abstract 
 statement in any science, we need 
 the laboratory of experimentation. The 
 *' thou shalts " and the " thou shalt nots " of 
 teaching make but small impression upon 
 our work, unless they are reinforced and 
 illustrated by examples of their practical 
 application. It is this fact which gives value 
 to biography; and it seems fitting in these 
 brief papers on the religious education of 
 the child to sketch here the biography of 
 a successful teacher of the last generation. 
 For the fundamental qualifications of a 
 teacher, and of the pupil, have not changed 
 much with the passing years; and the story 
 of one teacher's preparation, personality, and 
 methods may tend to stimulate those of the 
 present time. 
 
 There are lives which are long, but whose 
 biographies are expressed in the one word 
 
8o A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 — Service. Such was the record of the life 
 of the subject of this sketch. Born in the 
 South, of New England parents, she inher- 
 ited the deeply religious instincts of her 
 Pilgrim forefathers. To this was added the 
 moral training of the strictest Puritan type, 
 with its fixed notions of the absolute right 
 and wrong in human conduct. The rigid- 
 ness of this training was modified by the 
 genial, social influences of a semi-tropical 
 city of the Far South. The result of these 
 combined influences was a woman gracious 
 and tactful in her intercourse with others; 
 possessed of an earnest sense of duty toward 
 society, and a deep interest in humanity; 
 keenly intellectual, and enthusiastically de- 
 voted to the cause of helping her fellow-men 
 to better and more righteous living. 
 
 She used to recall the fact that she at- 
 tended missionary meetings with her mother 
 when she was only six years old; and she 
 remembered quite well how interested she 
 became in China, the mission for which the 
 good ladies were working. 
 
 She was taken to Sunday-School at the 
 
A BIOGRAPHY 8i 
 
 earliest age allowable in a time which knew 
 nothing of kindergarten methods in Sunday- 
 Schools. In the middle decades of the last 
 century no lesson papers were set forth for 
 ''Sabbath-Schools," with brief portions of 
 Scripture as a lesson, amply provided with 
 notes and illustrations, and with an unre- 
 lated Golden Text to be memorized. Nor 
 did the children make picture-books for the 
 lesson, or use any of the delightful aids that 
 now make the teacher's work easy. Then 
 the children were expected to memorize 
 whole chapters of the Bible, and catechism 
 was a very important part of every Sab- 
 bath's lesson. 
 
 The influence of the New England Primer 
 was still potent, and the earliest catechism 
 taught was one which inquired, *' Who was 
 the most patient man? Job." "Who was 
 the meekest man? Moses." "Who was 
 the man after God's own heart? David." 
 In this way the salient facts about the chief 
 characters of Bible history were taught. 
 
 At the age of sixteen she began teaching 
 in the Sunday-School ; and her active work 
 
82 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 as a teacher lasted until her seventieth year. 
 She saw children's children among her pu- 
 pils. Very early in her teaching she special- 
 ized as a teacher of little children, and 
 assumed charge of the Primary Department, 
 the Infant School as it was then called. But 
 her scholars carried the memory of her teach- 
 ing and influence through life, and sent their 
 children to be under her care, that their 
 lives too might have the goodly moulding 
 influence of the same great and well-loved 
 teacher. 
 
 For she was one of the ^' born teachers " ; 
 possessed of an eager desire to know, that 
 was second only to her yearning to impart, 
 she seemed to have an instinctive compre- 
 hension of the needs of the children and their 
 ability to understand ; and she knew how to 
 touch the springs of their affections and to 
 arouse their interest. Her normal-school 
 training had been her own full nursery ; but 
 long before her own nestlings came, her 
 usefulness was great. 
 
 She was a skilled musician, and played 
 the organ as well as taught the children. 
 
A BIOGRAPHY 83 
 
 And she taught them so to appreciate the 
 words and follow the tune that they were 
 happy to be consciously among those who 
 were " singing and making melody with 
 [their] heart to the Lord." They loved the 
 hymns of the Sunday-School, and well they 
 might; for the entire output of Sunday- 
 School music was examined that she might 
 cull the choicest hymns for the use of her 
 class. These hymns were stenciled on large 
 sheets, so that no one book furnished all the 
 music, and every one could sing. 
 
 Her great natural ability as a teller of 
 stories she consecrated to her work; and 
 long before there were any illustrations 
 available for Sunday-Schools, her scholars 
 knew and loved the Good Shepherd. So 
 vividly was the story told that every child 
 who heard it pictured to himself how ten- 
 derly the Good Shepherd looked upon his 
 flock ; and as he called himself " Jesus' lit- 
 tle lamb " felt drawn into a sweet personal 
 relation with the friend who was God. 
 
 The governing principle of her life was 
 love; and in her teaching she stressed the 
 
84 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 obligations of love rather than the fiat of 
 authority; and she taught her scholars to 
 love God, and to obey Him because they 
 loved Him. Such love of God can only be 
 taught by one ardent soul to another, for 
 faith is transmitted by contagion. 
 
 She led her scholars where she would, so 
 great was their attachment to her. They 
 were interested in missions because she was; 
 and made their offerings cheerfully, because 
 they knew and appreciated that so they 
 were helping other children to learn about 
 the Blessed Jesus who loved all little chil- 
 dren. 
 
 She taught them also the comfort and 
 beauty of prayer ; it was just talking with 
 God, the dear Saviour who loved them, who 
 was everywhere, and who could help them. 
 And nothing was too small for them to talk 
 to Him about ; no trouble so great but that 
 He could help. 
 
 One summer she met in the country a 
 little four-year-old boy who had never been 
 taught to pray. As they were walking to- 
 gether one evening, he confided to her his 
 
A BIOGRAPHY 85 
 
 fear of being alone in the attic, where he 
 went to bed before his mother came up for 
 the night. She told him about God's care 
 of him, and that he need only say at night, 
 " God, please take care of me." He stopped 
 short in the fields where they were walking, 
 and in the twilight lifted his little face to 
 the sky and said trustfully, " O God, please 
 take care of me to-night, and don't let any- 
 thing hurt me when I 'm alone in the attic" : 
 and then, quite care-free and happy, went 
 home to bed. Was it any wonder that in 
 later years, three Sunday-School superin- 
 tendents testified that they owed their relig- 
 ious inclination and training to the years in 
 the Infant Room ? 
 
 Her teaching was based upon the Bible, 
 and a rule of life or a principle of action 
 must be derived from that source to give it 
 authority in her eyes. Her broadly intelli- 
 gent and reverent mind took in the newer 
 explanations of scholarly criticism and used 
 them constructively; it was still God who 
 made the world, whether He took six days 
 or six epochs for creation. 
 
86 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 The close of the Civil War found many 
 churches as well as homes impoverished and 
 crippled. To her husband, a prominent busi- 
 ness man having extensive connections 
 throughout the State of Georgia, came 
 many appeals for aid. One church had lost 
 its communion service, another needed 
 hymn books ; — and so the stories ran. As 
 soon as she heard these tales, she sent letters 
 of inquiry concerning the Sunday-Schools. 
 Here was another tale of an agency for 
 good so demoralized that it was almost out 
 of existence. But still the children were 
 there ; women, if not men, could be found 
 for teachers ; and something must be done. 
 The South was ruined financially ; her social 
 organization was in chaos ; her political for- 
 tunes in the hands of rascally "carpet-bag- 
 gers," or ignorant experimenters. If she lost 
 her grasp on religion, or failed to train the 
 rising generation aright, what was her future 
 to be ? These country schools had no money 
 to pay for Bibles or hymn books or papers 
 or catechisms: how could they be taught? 
 These were the insistent questions which 
 
A BIOGRAPHY 87 
 
 came before her clear, practical, and conse- 
 crated brain for answer. 
 , And the answer to the questions came. 
 She devised a card about four and a half by- 
 six inches in size, on one side of which the 
 words and music of a hymn were printed ; 
 on the obverse there was printed a portion 
 of Scripture, with questions about it ; and 
 then a few questions from the catechism. 
 
 It was not a simple matter to publish 
 these cards, for the permission of publishers 
 to reprint hymns had to be obtained ; and 
 printing music was more troublesome and 
 expensive then than it is now. But no diffi- 
 culty was too great for her earnest zeal and 
 practical management. The cost of printing 
 and distribution was generously assumed by 
 her husband, and so for three years, at a cost 
 of five hundred dollars a year, eight hundred 
 of these cards were sent out, each month, to 
 the Sunday-Schools in the destitute country 
 districts of North Carolina, South Carolina, 
 Georgia, Florida, and Alabama. The num- 
 ber sent varied from ten to twenty, accord- 
 ing to the size of the school. This service 
 
88 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 of help was deeply appreciated by the faith- 
 ful workers in the schools; and her family 
 treasure many grateful letters from ministers 
 and teachers. At the end of three years 
 conditions had become normal, and the 
 Sunday-Schools were able to provide for 
 themselves. 
 
 All this time she was not only conduct- 
 ing the Infant Class of her own Sunday- 
 School, but was efficiently cooperating with 
 the work of the whole school. On her trips 
 to the North, every summer, she visited Sun- 
 day-Schools to gather new ideas as to teach- 
 ing and equipment. These she carried back 
 to the work at home ; and so much was her 
 judgment trusted that they were at once in- 
 troduced. 
 
 Life brought many changes after the 
 death of her husband, and sorrow followed 
 sorrow ; but her strong faith and courageous 
 heart withstood the shocks and she found a 
 solace for grief in wider plans for useful- 
 ness. To her it seemed that at least once a 
 year a great central Bible truth should be 
 emphasized in the Sunday-School. And so 
 
A BIOGRAPHY 89 
 
 she proposed that the anniversary of the 
 founding of the Sunday-School should be 
 especially observed in this way. 
 
 For these occasions she arranged an exer- 
 cise in which the words of the great central 
 truth were formed by floral letters brought 
 by the several classes, and placed on a frame- 
 work of gray moss, bordered lavishly with 
 flowers. As each class brought its letter, it 
 recited a Bible verse which bore on the main 
 theme. The lesson was emphasized by ap- 
 propriate hymns and an address which 
 summed up the whole exercise. These oc- 
 casions drew immense audiences, so that 
 the lesson was widely taught. Later the cus- 
 tom was adopted by many of the schools 
 of the city. 
 
 Wherever this teacher lived, she taught 
 the children. As soon as her residence was 
 fixed in a place, if only for the winter, she 
 offered her services in the Sunday-School. 
 She spent one year in a German city, but 
 even here her activities were continued. For 
 her heart was concerned for the spiritual wel- 
 fare of the little English and American chil- 
 
90 A CHILD^S RELIGION 
 
 dren, expatriated by their parents' love of art, 
 travel, or business, who were without any 
 Sunday-School privileges or instruction. 
 
 So she opened her own apartment every 
 Sunday afternoon, and taught all the chil- 
 dren whose parents would bring or send 
 them to her. It never occurred to her, as it 
 seems to do to some people, that a residence 
 abroad absolved her from the obligations of 
 Christian duty. Here were little children for 
 whom nothing was being done; that consti- 
 tuted both her call and her opportunity: and 
 the answered call brought its own rich re- 
 ward. 
 
 So the years passed ; busy years, useful in 
 many lines of activities, but always her Sun- 
 day-School was her largest interest. 
 
 At seventy, the circumstances of life took 
 her away from her home city, and she was 
 then physically unequal to undertaking 
 work in a new place. Henceforth her teach- 
 ing was confined to the children whom she 
 met or gathered around her, the friends of 
 her grandchildren. And children were al- 
 ways drawn to her ; for they felt the deep 
 
A BIOGRAPHY 91 
 
 love that was flowing out to them, and their 
 reciprocal affection was her great comfort. 
 
 As years and infirmities increased, this 
 became more and more precious; and even 
 at the last, when she was crippled in speech 
 and motion by paralysis, little children 
 would run to help her tottering steps, and sit 
 and talk to her, and pay her those loving little 
 attentions which children know how to pay. 
 
 " Her brave and faithful love for God 
 and her fellowmen," as one has described 
 hers, had borne fruit in many directions. 
 Benevolent aid societies, industrial homes, 
 orphan asylums, homes for newsboys and 
 working girls, Indian associations and mis- 
 sionary societies as well as Sunday-Schools, 
 had all felt the efficiency of her connection 
 with them. Yet at the very last, when the 
 shadows of approaching change were gath- 
 ering close and speech was difficult, she 
 turned to her daughter and said, " The 
 longer I live, the more it seems to me that 
 the only thing worth while is to work for 
 souls; and if God spares my life, I shall try 
 to do more of it." 
 
92 A CHILD^S RELIGION 
 
 The call to the larger life came soon after; 
 and with a murmured, " Come, Lord," the 
 teacher of little children went into the pres- 
 ence of the Great Teacher who had de- 
 clared that " of such is the kingdom of 
 heaven." 
 
VIII 
 
 THE CHILDLIKE TEACHER 
 
 IT is as the Great Teacher that we who 
 are teaching like to think of our Blessed 
 Lord; for it implies not only that he is our 
 model, but it gives us a sense of helpful 
 sympathy with our work. " He taught the 
 people"; and surely he knew the weariness 
 of unresponsiveness to his message, the dis- 
 heartening that came from finding that his 
 pupils followed Him " for loaves and fishes" 
 and miracles, even as ours may sometimes 
 come for material benefits. He knew» too, 
 the sadness of having his pupils turn out 
 badly; was not Judas a traitor? And his 
 was also that more joyful experience, the 
 true compensation of the teacher, of know- 
 ing that the whole current of a man's life had 
 been changed by his teaching, and that his 
 pupils were teachers in their turn. 
 
 And yet He who said, " Go ye, and teach 
 all nations," said also, "Except ye become 
 
94 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 as little children, ye shall in no wise enter 
 into the kingdom of heaven." This must 
 surely have implied that even in our teaching 
 we could learn from the child, and that the 
 ideal teacher was the childlike teacher. Can 
 this be so — that we grown men and women 
 must approach our task of high privilege as 
 a child would? We are accustomed to think 
 of the child as a pet, or perhaps a splendid 
 possibility entrusted to our care; but to see 
 the child as a model for teachers is to ap- 
 proach him from a new viewpoint. 
 
 What, then, is the child that we may learn 
 from him? 
 
 The most prominent characteristic of a 
 child is that he is ever learning, ever increas- 
 ing his knowledge of himself, of life, of facts 
 of all sorts. The baby grasping at the sun- 
 beam becomes the man who grasps at the 
 difficult and unachieved in the material uni- 
 verse. The child playing with his own fingers 
 and toes to establish his identity becomes 
 later the keen psychologist or the skillful 
 biologist who can trace the microscopic germ 
 through a dozen transformations. The re- 
 
THE CHILDLIKE TEACHER 95 
 
 former of to-day was the infant destroyer of 
 the established in the nursery of yesterday; 
 and the curious and sometimes troublesome 
 prying of the child develops into the patient 
 investigation of the scientist, who is trying 
 to read the thoughts of God after Him as 
 they are written in the book of nature. For 
 the child earnestly desires to know; and his 
 mental attitude, often his spoken one, is that 
 of interrogating the universe. 
 
 Another marked trait of the child is his 
 desire to impart knowledge. As fast as he 
 learns anything, he wants to teach it to some 
 one else ; if there are younger children in his 
 home, they are his pupils ; if not, he must 
 tell his elders; for knowledge is not fully 
 his until he has shared its joy with others. 
 This joy of conscious gain in knowledge 
 which the child has is an enviable posses- 
 sion, and one that only constant advance in 
 knowledge can give us. 
 
 It is interesting to note also that when a 
 child is telling what he has learned, he uses 
 his own words ; for he assimilates his knowl- 
 edge, it becomes a part of his mind, and 
 
96 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 then he is ready to give it to others. And 
 because of this perfect assimilation he can 
 tell his story vividly, enthusiastically, and 
 in such fashion that his little mates will 
 understand it. For this reason a child learns 
 easily from another child; for he receives 
 only the knowledge that the other child has 
 perfectly comprehended. 
 
 If our words are to make an impression, 
 therefore, we must not only know the pro- 
 cesses of the child mind, and approach our 
 subject sympathetically from the child's point 
 of view, but must teach from the fullness 
 of perfectly assimilated knowledge. No mere 
 repetition of phrases, however beautiful, will 
 give us this power: when the truths that we 
 would teach have become a part of our own 
 thinking, we shall teach them simply, faith- 
 fully, and thus convincingly. When the 
 great doctrines have been realized in our 
 living, they will not be difficult to explain 
 to the child; for instead of theological state- 
 ments we shall give him living truth. 
 
 Even from a child's conversation we may 
 philosophically draw helpful suggestions as 
 
THE CHILDLIKE TEACHER 97 
 
 to the topics which we may use in our 
 teaching. His conversation is made up of 
 his knowledge and observations of the world; 
 and all knowledge and all facts he relates to 
 himself. If he is telling of historical exploits 
 he begins, " Once there was a man " ; and 
 because the hero was a man, he can become, 
 and has become, a part of the child's life and 
 world, although many centuries may have 
 elapsed since the exploit. 
 
 The great object of our teaching should 
 be to take the common events of everyday 
 life, as the child does, and transfuse them 
 with divinity. This is the method of all the 
 great teachers of the Bible itself 
 
 Look through the writings of the prophets, 
 and observe the commonplaceness of many 
 of their suggestions and similes. The washer- 
 woman at her tub, the ox and his master, 
 the ass and his crib, the potter at his wheel ; 
 the builder, the carver, the refiner at his fur- 
 nace, the woodcutter, the ploughman at his 
 toil, the sheep-shearer as well as the shep- 
 herd ; the lonely watcher in the garden of 
 cucumbers, the weaver at his loom, the mes- 
 
98 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 senger, — each in his accustomed task fur- 
 nished a reference or a suggestion for the 
 preacher: and the poet Isaiah does not 
 despise even the homely illustration of the 
 bed that was too short, and the covering 
 that was too narrow, for comfort. (Isaiah 
 28:20.) 
 
 From Olympic races and gladiatorial com- 
 bats St Paul drew vivid comparisons of the 
 race that is " set before us " and of the good 
 fight that we must fight; and from the Ro- 
 man soldier who guarded him, he drew the 
 picture of the armor of the Christian in his 
 warfare against the powers of evil. To-day, 
 gladiatorial combats have given way to base- 
 ball and football games; and lessons of self- 
 control, of calmness, can be more effectively 
 presented, if illustrations taken from these 
 contests are used, than if we try to impress 
 alone the lesson, " he that ruleth his spirit 
 [is better] than he that taketh a city." 
 (Proverbs 19: 15.) 
 
 Our Lord continued the same sort of 
 teaching, and drew his parables from the 
 woman with a broom distractedly seeking a 
 
THE CHILDLIKE TEACHER 99 
 
 lost coin, and the thrifty placing of the one 
 candle that it might give the utmost light; 
 the pearl merchant and the fisherman, each 
 at his task. He took note of the difference 
 in the foundations of houses, of successful 
 and unsuccessful business ventures, of real 
 estate transactions ; of faithful servants and 
 wasteful retainers. We find Him discussing 
 in his talks such secular subjects as taxation, 
 hospitality, and all sorts of social questions. 
 He discussed the current opinions of the 
 day, and proved their incorrectness. He 
 took the common sayings of the people, 
 "Ye say the sky is red ... ye can discern 
 the face of the sky," using their vernacular, 
 and pointed his lessons with them. 
 
 From the daily life of the people He 
 drew illustrations ; He took into his teach- 
 ing the common life of man, with its phases 
 of birth, marriage, illness, and death ; shad- 
 owed as it is by prodigal sons and erring 
 daughters ; took it with its ordinary occu- 
 pations and experiences, and lifted it into 
 divine significance. 
 
 The life of to-day offers to us a wealth 
 
loo A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 of illustrative material unknown to earlier 
 times; the air-ship, the talking motion pic- 
 tures, the gyroscope, all the mechanical 
 marvels that mark our time, together with 
 all the wizardry of chemistry and the newly 
 discovered wonders of the processes of life, 
 are ours to use. 
 
 Some years ago, Henry Drummond's 
 great book, " Natural Law in the Spiritual 
 World," stirred thinking souls profoundly ; 
 to-day, our task is to show the child the 
 spiritual values of his everyday life, the spir- 
 itual law in the natural world. Let us not fear 
 to use these things in our teaching; let us not 
 put the vi^orld into two sections, labeled re- 
 spectively "sacred" and "secular," which 
 must be always separated. There is but one 
 universe of men, one Creator; it is all his 
 world. Too long have we kept our sacred 
 things apart, kept religion and our occupa- 
 tions on a separate plane. The salvation of 
 the future, the hope of society, lies in unit- 
 ing the sacred and secular, in acknowledg- 
 ing the universal sovereignty of God, not 
 his kingship over merely a small province 
 
THE CHILDLIKE TEACHE& loi 
 
 in the lives of men. The Jewish nation of 
 old even went to war feeling that Jehovah 
 was with them. To be able to find God in 
 human affairs, in the games and lives and 
 interests of children, — even as in nations, 
 — is to make the Incarnation a living real- 
 ity for the child, a doctrine of inspiration. 
 No life that feels God in it so intimately 
 can ever become sordid. 
 
 There is another lesson that we may learn 
 from the child, and that is how to pray; for 
 the child has surely mastered the art of ask- 
 ing. For he asks definitely for what he wants ; 
 there is no vagueness in the expression of 
 his desires, no lack of fullness in his peti- 
 tions. He asks earnestly for the things that 
 he desires from his parents, confident of their 
 ability to supply his wants, believing that 
 it needs only his request to make these 
 things his ; for he is assured that the power 
 which he petitions is a loving one, who will 
 withhold no good thing from him who asks 
 trustingly. This is the " assurance of faith " 
 which the saints possess ; and it is this calm 
 trust that He can^ He willy because He loves^ 
 
102 A CHlLt)*S RELIGION 
 
 that must underlie all our prayers, if we 
 hope to " grasp with firmer hand [the] eternal 
 grace " which shall fit us to teach the child 
 that he may pray to his heavenly Father in 
 such fashion as he petitions his earthly par- 
 ents. 
 
 From yet another point of view we find 
 the child suggestive ; for the law, the most 
 prominent characteristic of the child is 
 growth. The watchwords of his education 
 are, "I must be, I must do, I must be- 
 come*'; and his growth must evince itself 
 along these three lines of character, action, 
 and aspiration. As teachers we must grow, 
 and our growth also must show in increased 
 achievement, more developed character, and 
 larger aspiration. Let us examine ourselves 
 along these three lines ; for in order to meas- 
 ure growth, we must have a definite starting- 
 point of comparison. 
 
 Why should we know ourselves? The 
 message may be true and be adapted to the 
 child, but does the personality of the teacher 
 count for naught? Were this true the in- 
 struction might be given by a graphophone 
 
THE CHILDLIKE TEACHER 103 
 
 to hundreds at once, and in many places at 
 the same time. St. Paul tells the Thessalo- 
 nians that '' we were well pleased to impart 
 unto you, not the gospel of God only, but 
 also our own souls" (1 Thess. 2:9); and 
 a distinguished educator (Dr. Flavel L. 
 Luther, of Trinity College) sums up the 
 situation thus : " There must be put into 
 these young souls from the lips and exam- 
 ples of those who teach them a great yearn- 
 ing for righteousness, a complete consecra- 
 tion to the service of God, a full curriculum 
 of instruction unto the kingdom of heaven." 
 
 " On the East Side of New York," says 
 Mary Antin, "teacher is a being adored. 
 Said a bedraggled Jewish mother to her 
 little boy who had affronted his teacher, 
 'Don't you know that teachers is holy?' " 
 
 A skilled workman knows his tools; and 
 since the personality of the teacher is part 
 of his equipment, evidently our first duty 
 is to know ourselves. 
 
 Introspection is not much the fashion 
 nowadays; most of us think of it as belong- 
 ing to the discipline of convents and early 
 
I04 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 pietists. But we surely need it. Carried 
 along as we are by the rush of events, 
 caught under the Wheel of Things, our 
 real selves impinged on all sides by the 
 Juxtaposition of other personalities, do we 
 not need to extricate ourselves by deliberate 
 intention, and in our own closets to exam- 
 ine ourselves? 
 
 What coloring shall the Great Message 
 take as it passes through our lips and lives 
 to our classes? Do we know our own 
 faults, our own propensities, our own abil- 
 ities ? Are we conscious of our own preju- 
 dices, the likes and dislikes which may affect 
 our teaching? Then there are our relations 
 to the body social to be considered. The 
 time is full of organizations aimed to reform 
 the state of society ; what is our attitude 
 toward them ? — indifference, ignorance, or 
 sympathy? Is the brotherhood of man a 
 phrase to which we give an intellectual as- 
 sent merely, or are we really interested in 
 solving the problems of congested cities, and 
 underpaid and overworked fellowmen ? All 
 of these things make that subtle and intan- 
 
THE CHILDLIKE TEACHER 105 
 
 gible thing known as character, which we 
 so unconsciously transmit to our pupils and 
 associates. 
 
 We need also to take note of our intellec- 
 tual equipment. " I 'm in the fifth grade 
 now, I was in the fourth grade last year," 
 the child will tell you with pride, for he 
 keeps a record of his growth in knowledge. 
 In every well-organized business there is 
 maintained a reserve fund, which is added 
 to every year, to provide for the "obso- 
 lescence and inadequacy of equipment." It 
 would seem that all of us have need of such 
 a reserve fund in our intellectual capital if 
 we are to continue to teach effectively. Our 
 ideas may grow old, and our way of pre- 
 senting truth be inadequate to the needs 
 and opportunities of the present day; for 
 even the very phraseology of religion has 
 changed. There should be an accumulation 
 of new capital added to our mental assets 
 every year; new ideas should come in to 
 displace the old ones, we should adopt new 
 methods suited to new needs. Machinery 
 is discarded in factories to-day, not because 
 
io6 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 it has broken down or does not do the work, 
 it once did, but because a new improvement 
 in machinery will produce greater efBciency 
 and increase the output. Shall we be con- 
 tent with less than our highest efficiency in 
 this task ? 
 
 The child knows the world around him ; 
 what do we know of our world ? Let us 
 open our eyes and see ; for " He hath made 
 everything beautiful in its time: also he 
 hath set the world in their heart." (EccL 
 3:11.) Can we teach the child convinc- 
 ingly that the presence of God fills all na- 
 ture, if chemistry, biology, botany, geology, 
 and astronomy are merely names to us? 
 Why teach him the miracles of centuries 
 ago, and not also open his eyes to the daily 
 miracles around him ? Is the growth of a 
 giant pine from a tiny seed any the less a 
 marvel because the process is familiar! 
 Should we not wonder at the intelligence 
 of the ant, who knows the process of ger- 
 mination so well that she bites off the 
 sprouting point before storing the grains 
 in her granaries under ground? 
 
THE CHILDLIKE TEACHER 107 
 
 Open the child's eyes to the vastness of 
 the universe; show him those points of 
 starry light which form ''the ordered system 
 of the marching orbs [which] he makes in 
 viewless majesty of sky " ; those gigantic 
 worlds, suspended in unthinkable space, 
 obedient to an unwritten law laid upon 
 them from the beginning. 
 
 The Bible is the greatest nature book in 
 the world. Summer's quartette of birds, 
 bees, butterflies, and blossoms flit through 
 its pages ; the peace of the great mountains 
 is there, and ''the deep that coucheth be- 
 neath"; the starry heavens bend over it, 
 and there are "the precious things of the 
 everlasting hills." (Deut. 33: 13.) And he 
 who would make this a living book to the 
 child must know the world and bring it to 
 him. 
 
 "Isn't this a beautiful morning?" re- 
 marked a lady to a laboring-man walking 
 along a country road. He answered, "I 
 have n't time to look at the sky." Can 
 we have our children grow up with such 
 calloused souls? But we cannot interpret 
 
io8 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 this great nature book of God's revelation, 
 unless we are of those whose spirits are so 
 sensitive that they can 
 
 **Fcel the warm Orient in the noontide air. 
 And from cloud-minarets hear the sunset call to 
 prayer." 
 
 To Archdeacon Stuck, toiling among the 
 icy wastes of Mount Denahli, the remark- 
 able deep blue of the Arctic sky seemed 
 " like special news of God." 
 
 Sidney Lanier, looking out over the 
 marshes of Glynn, watched a marsh hen, 
 and another aspect of God in nature broke 
 upon his inward vision: — 
 
 ** As the marsh hen secretly builds on the watery sod, 
 Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God : 
 I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh hen 
 
 flies 
 In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh 
 
 and the skies: 
 By so many roots as the marsh grass sends in the sod, 
 I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of 
 
 God." 
 
 We are not all poets, not all alike sensi- 
 tive; nor are the children whom we teach 
 
THE CHILDLIKE TEACHER 109 
 
 alike in this respect; but we must cultivate 
 this spirit in ourselves, and educate it in 
 them, if the " immanence of God '' is to be 
 a comforting fact in their lives, and not 
 merely a barren statement. Nature speaks to 
 those who will listen to her. In the quiet of 
 the woods and fields the air may palpitate 
 with the felt presence of God, as really as at 
 the most solemn moment of service in the 
 cathedral. 
 
 So into the fields, O Lord, we come. 
 The fields of the flower and trc.e ; 
 And our souls draw life from the breath of the flowers. 
 And our hearts are cleansed by the dewy showers ; 
 J For by flower, and leaf and the insect's hum. 
 We have spoken, O Lord, with thee ! 
 
 There is a third and most important field 
 of knowledge in which we must know our 
 own place. We should seriously ask our- 
 selves, " What do I know of God? " Some- 
 times from very reverence we fear to inter- 
 rogate ourselves on this subject, hindered 
 also by a vague sense of the impossibility 
 of knowing the unknowable, of trying to 
 comprehend the Infinite God. 
 
no A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 Perhaps we content ourselves with phrases 
 which have become so traditional that they 
 have lost the sharp vitality which would 
 make them an incisive force in our lives. 
 Do we believe in a phrase ? Or is our creed 
 the dynamic of our living ? It is not the lips 
 that teach, but the life; it is not our creed 
 that will influence the child, but our char- 
 acter which interprets it for him. And so it 
 is of the utmost importance that we ask our- 
 selves some pointed questions, and insist 
 upon answers. 
 
 Do I know God as the All-Wise, the All- 
 Powerful, the All-Loving? — know Him 
 not only as the just and awful judge, but as 
 the loving Father of our Lord Jesus Christ 
 and of us? — know Him not only as the 
 King of Kings and of the universe, but as 
 the Divine Disposer of the events of my own 
 life? Do I know these things with that 
 " audacious certitude of faith " which char- 
 acterized Habakkuk, so that I am willing to 
 posit life upon it, and live in the glorious 
 and comforting certainty that the great God 
 who " hath made the earth by his power " 
 
THE CHILDLIKE TEACHER iii 
 
 (Jer. 51:15), is my shepherd and so I shall 
 not want? This is the faith which will 
 carry the child over life's hard places; is it 
 ours to impart ? 
 
 And after we have thus found ourselves, 
 have measured our own stature in this way, 
 we must follow the law of growth and in- 
 crease. This will require deliberate effort 
 on our part as well as earnest desire. For 
 growth in our capacity as teachers follows 
 the law of life, and depends upon food, exer- 
 cise, and environment. These things are not 
 left to chance with the child that is well 
 nurtured. We are our own guardians in this 
 matter; and it behooves us to place ourselves 
 in such an environment, to find for our souls 
 such nourishment, and to develop our soul 
 qualities by such exercise, that we may con- 
 tinually increase in knowledge of ourselves, 
 in comprehension of our world, and in sensi- 
 tiveness to the presence of God. 
 
 There is still a question which we must 
 ask, and by the answer to this we can de- 
 termine whether we belong to those teachers 
 who desire to grow, and so turn to the child 
 
112 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 for helpful suggestions. "Why must I go to 
 Sunday-School?" says the rare child who is 
 unwilling to go. Why do we go to Sunday- 
 School to teach ? is a question which we may 
 well ask ourselves. 
 
 Perhaps the motive that brought us was 
 merely a feeling that we wanted to do some 
 form of church work, and this was the usual 
 one to undertake ; and so we came to it with- 
 out feeling that urgent and special call which 
 is as essential to successful work in teaching 
 as in preaching. If this is so, we need to pray 
 with double earnestness, — 
 
 ** Lord, speak to me, that I may speak 
 In living echoes of Thy tone." 
 
 But if we really have been called to this 
 divine work, we come because we have rea- 
 lized so much what the knowledge of God 
 means that we want to help the children to 
 attain the same. We come because we have 
 learned something so precious that we must 
 impart it to others. For we have learned that 
 to have Jesus Christ at the center of our 
 lives is a well-spring of joy ; that to follow 
 
THE CHILDLIKE TEACHER 113 
 
 his example is the sure road to happiness; 
 and that a vital apprehension of the love of 
 the Father, manifested in the Son, makes life 
 one continuous feast of thanksgiving, a liv- 
 ing doxology. 
 
 This, then, is the great task for which we 
 would prepare ourselves. And to that end 
 we must so live that we may teach the child 
 that all life belongs to God; that the one 
 form of growth that never reaches comple- 
 tion is to grow " in grace, and in the know- 
 ledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ" 
 (2 Peter 3: 18); that all the activities of life 
 may find their inspiration in Him; and that 
 in his teachings are to be found the solutions 
 for all social problems. 
 
 We must show the child also that since 
 "in Him all fullness dwelleth," so all art and 
 history and nature may meet in Him. We 
 must, in short, so teach the child that he shall 
 "sum up all things in Christ" (Eph. 3: 10), 
 for this it is to be a Christian. 
 
IX 
 
 THE OLD BIBLE AND THE NEW CHILD 
 
 OF all the books that have come down 
 to us from antiquity the most remark- 
 able is that Book of books, commonly known 
 as the Bible. Composite in its character, the 
 work of many men, part of its manuscripts 
 are among the earliest extent, while others 
 date only from the first century of our era. 
 
 But whether selected by Jewish elders or 
 Christian Councils, the included books were 
 placed there because they contained unmis- 
 takably the teaching of the Holy Spirit. 
 And because men believed it to contain the 
 messages of God to men, they have guarded 
 its text with zealous care. 
 
 It is a book red with the blood of those 
 who have witnessed to its truth with their 
 lives. The roll of the saints is long, from 
 those faithful Jews who loved the Law and 
 died for it, to persecuted Wycliffe, and to 
 Tyndale burning at the stake, because he 
 dared to put its teachings within the reach 
 
BIBLE AND CHILD 115 
 
 of every Englishman. Even in our own day 
 the missionary colporteurs have braved death 
 to circulate the Bible. Through all these ages 
 men have loved the book because they were 
 convinced that only in its pages was to be 
 found a satisfaction for the soul-hunger of 
 the world. 
 
 The historian Green has eloquently told 
 the relation of the English Bible to English 
 civilization, and how it has come to pass 
 that English literature bears such unmistak- 
 able traits of Jewish ancestry. For these great 
 messages came to us embodied in splendid 
 examples of the story-teller's art, and are sung 
 in some of the sublimest poetry ever written; 
 and here, and here only, has been answered 
 the age-recurring question, " Whence came 
 I, whither am I going?" 
 
 But we Americans may add another chap- 
 ter even to Green's eloquence. Amid the 
 desolation of the pioneer winters, especially 
 in bleak New England, no library opened 
 then its hospitable doors; no morning paper 
 appeared as if by magic on their doorsteps, 
 to bring them the news of the world for break- 
 
ii6 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 fast-table discussion; and so men were thrown 
 back upon the Bible for literature as for re- 
 ligion. 
 
 It was indeed to them a Book of books; 
 for here they found, to quote Green, "Le- 
 gend and annal, war song and psalm, state- 
 roll and biography, the mighty voices of 
 prophets, the parables of evangelists, stories 
 of mission journeys, of perils by the sea and 
 among the heathen, philosophic arguments, 
 apocalyptic visions." Its characters peopled 
 the wilderness for them, and robbed it of its 
 awful lonesomeness; for the God of the de- 
 sert was there. And the tempest was shorn 
 of its terrors by the majestic recital of the 
 power of the great Jehovah, who rode upon 
 the wings of the storm, and stilled the raging 
 of the sea; for was not "stormy wind fulfill- 
 ing his word"? 
 
 As they read the great stories of old, of 
 the help given the Chosen People in their 
 times of need, they drew deep draughts of 
 courage from the recital, and took to them- 
 selves those promises of help. They modeled 
 their government upon that early theocracy; 
 
BIBLE AND CHILD 117 
 
 they took the stern and serious prophets for 
 their exemplars; and named their children 
 after the old worthies and the Christian graces ; 
 so that Prudence and Bethuel, Ezra and 
 Eunice, Grace and Temperance, might be 
 found in the same family. The people of the 
 Bible were so real to them that they were 
 their companions. It was said of one lady 
 that as she grew older "she spent less time 
 with Elijah under the juniper tree, and with 
 Jeremiah in the pit. She rarely marched to 
 battle with Joshua. But she walked often 
 with Moses up and down the mountains of 
 the wilderness, she mused with David in the 
 valleys and pastures." ' 
 
 Into the fabric of our history has been 
 woven the result of that constant association 
 with the Bible; and no future historian of 
 these United States can adequately judge us 
 or our forbears, unless he recognizes this fact 
 of our early reverence for, and familiarity 
 with, the old Bible. ' 
 
 So was it once with us. The Bible was the 
 ark of every household, the arbiter in all 
 
 « F. B. Squire, The Ballingtons. 
 
ii8 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 questions of right and wrong. It was a rev- 
 erenced document, whose every word was 
 deemed inspired, whose every statement was 
 undisputed fact. And although we had finally 
 accepted Galileo's theory of the universe, and 
 so regarded as poetry the psalmist's declar- 
 I ation that the going forth of the sun is from 
 
 one end of the heaven to the other, yet we 
 held fast with reverent tenacity to the literal 
 six days of creation. The Book of Jonah 
 was regarded as an historical treatise, and we 
 held it for fact that at Joshua's command the 
 sun and moon stood still. The age under- 
 stood that the prophet's "Thus saith the 
 Lord" indicated a message which had been 
 conveyed to him in a voice that would have 
 been audible to others, had they been pre- 
 sent. We knew that the Bible was a collec- 
 tion of books, written probably at various 
 times; but we still held it to be inspired in 
 word and in statement of fact. 
 
 It thus became to Protestantism the most 
 sacred of objects. The irrevocable oath was 
 sworn upon it, instead of upon the bones of 
 saints or pieces of the Holy Rood. Its utter- 
 
BIBLE AND CHILD 119 
 
 ances were sacrosanct, and one's eternal sal- 
 vation was imperiled by doubt of the accu- 
 racy of its scientific or historical statements. 
 To many it was an oracle, and in cases of 
 doubt or perplexity the verse upon which the 
 eye alighted at a chance opening of the book 
 was regarded as a heaven-inspired direction 
 for action. The book itself was holy; a soldier 
 whose life had been saved because a Bible in 
 his bosom stopped the bullet, was looked 
 upon as a signal instance of the interposing 
 of Divine Providence. 
 
 It was "the impregnable rock of Holy 
 Scripture"; all doctrine must be proved by 
 literal texts, even though taken piecemeal 
 from their contexts ; for back of every word 
 was supposedly a " Thus saith the Lord." 
 
 A narrow view it seems now to us, but 
 a deep one in its effect upon the characters 
 of those who held it. For here was an object 
 of reverence present in every household ; a 
 continual reminder of that Higher Power, 
 and man's dependence upon it; something 
 to reach up to ; a standing refutation of that 
 growing democratic principle, that all men. 
 
I20 A CHILD^S RELIGION 
 
 all places, all things, were alike equal. It 
 was the trusted guide of life and conduct; 
 the unchangeable in a world of change ; the 
 inerrant in a world of ignorance and uncer- 
 tainty. 
 
 This it was to the faithful, and more. For 
 although " Thus saith the Lord" terrified 
 the evildoers, it comforted the trusting hearts; 
 and they forgot the terrors of the Law in 
 the gentleness of the Gospel. 
 
 In such an atmosphere the child grew up 
 of old. He was accustomed to see his grand- 
 mother sitting, as one has said, with her 
 Bible on her knee, and the light of a far- 
 seeing wonder on her face. 
 
 His toys included a Noah's ark ; and his 
 animal stories were not of the jungle, but of 
 the serpent in Eden; of the ram caught in 
 the bushes, which took Isaac's place; of 
 Noah's exploring dove, of Balaam's speak- 
 ing ass ; of the lion that Samson slew bare- 
 handed ; of the ravens that fed EHjah ; of the 
 bears that devoured the irreverent children 
 who had mocked Elisha ; of the " little ewe 
 lamb " of Nathan's rebuking parable ; of the 
 
BIBLE AND CHILD 121 
 
 fish that St Peter caught with money in its 
 mouth for taxes ; of the sparrows sold for a 
 farthing; and of that favored animal that 
 carried the king when He triumphantly en- 
 tered Jerusalem. 
 
 In his garden the " birds of the air '* found 
 nests in the cedars of Lebanon and the olives 
 of Gethsemane, in the withered fig tree, and 
 the mustard tree that had grown great from 
 a small seed. There grew also the "mint, 
 and the anise, and the cummin," the lilies 
 of the field that toiled not, and the rose of 
 Sharon; the weeping willows of Babylon, 
 and that tree of life "which bare twelve 
 crops of fruit," whose leaves were " for the 
 healing of the nations." 
 
 The stories of Moses and Joseph were the 
 familiar tales of his infancy ; and the pictur- 
 esque story of the Deliverance from Egypt 
 and the forty years' wandering he followed 
 as to-day one reads a serial story. He was 
 thrilled with the adventures of Gideon and 
 Samson, the daring exploits of David and 
 Jonathan ; the magnificence of Solomon, 
 and the splendid bravery of Queen Esther. 
 
122 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 The child prophet Samuel, the child king 
 Joash, and the child Saviour, all had their 
 special appeal for him. 
 
 So well had the pious chroniclers done 
 their work that the child drew from their 
 stories the lesson they tried to teach in their 
 recital of history : that the one heinous sin 
 was to forget to serve God, a sin for which 
 no political magnificence offered any pallia- 
 tion: and they grasped unconsciously the 
 stupendous truth that God is the Almighty 
 Ruler who exacts righteousness from nations 
 as well as from individuals. 
 
 The religion that the old child derived 
 from the old Bible was a very personal one. 
 To him all nature became, in Goethe's phrase, 
 "for deity a living robe sublime." To him 
 the great force in nature was not concealed 
 in such a phrase as ''an anthropomorphic 
 God"; but was "my God, my Lord," a 
 personal possession. 
 
 But forces were at work to change all 
 this, to bring it to pass that the old Bible 
 should become the new Bible, even as the 
 old child was becoming the new child. 
 
BIBLE AND CHILD 123 
 
 Men had been seeking truth in the Bible 
 since the Reformation; and the search had 
 emancipated their powers and widened their 
 horizon. Starting with the theory that every 
 word was true and inspired, yet knowing 
 the fallibility of transcribers, scholars had 
 sought to obtain the earliest manuscripts of 
 the Bible. They were inspired with the de- 
 sire to know the truth, by the Bible empha- 
 sis upon it; and the scientific spirit abroad 
 in the world compelled them to investigate 
 the very text of the sacred books. To this 
 task they brought the critical acumen gained 
 in many lines of study. They fearlessly 
 pushed their investigations, and drew their 
 conclusions as the truth seemed to be shown 
 to them. 
 
 They found that the Bible was not only 
 a book of books, but that many of these 
 books were themselves compilations, edited 
 under one name. Then they put the parts 
 together in what they believed to be the 
 true historical order, irrespective of the fact 
 that they were destroying thus age-old tra- 
 ditions of authorship and of the sequence of 
 
.124 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 events. They were seeking the truth ; were 
 they not also seeking the Master who said, 
 *' I am the Truth"? 
 
 Some of these Higher Critics followed the 
 search at great personal cost. For earnest 
 seekers after truth were branded as heretics; 
 and the advocacy of the results of these stud- 
 ies cost many a man his position as teacher 
 or preacher. 
 
 Nor is this to be wondered at, for some 
 of our old opinions were rudely shaken. 
 No longer were we amazed at the advanced 
 piety of some of the early kings; for we 
 found that the piety of the Exilic period 
 was responsible for the form of its expres- 
 sion. Some things that we had thought of 
 as history were denominated poetry ; and the 
 new knowledge altered our ideas of some of 
 the historical characters. 
 
 Yet the gains of this scholarly criticism 
 were great. 
 
 The prophets were placed approximately 
 each in his proper historical setting, and 
 with a known background the universal ap- 
 peal of their prophecies was strengthened. 
 
BIBLE AND CHILD 125 
 
 The placing of all events and writings in 
 their correct historical order has opened our 
 eyes to a great fact: that the human race 
 grew in its power of spiritual receptivity, 
 and that as it grew, the enlarged revelation 
 was given to it. We find here the authority 
 for saying that the religious development 
 of nations and of individuals is a growth; 
 that we are not born spiritually perfected, 
 and that no one generation has sounded the 
 depths nor reached the heights possible of 
 attainment by the spirit of man ; and that 
 the voice of prophecy is not dumb, but is 
 sounding to-day in the ears that are open to 
 hear it. 
 
 Surely this is a great gain. There is hope in 
 such a view of the Scriptures ; there is a hu- 
 manness that makes their grandeur and 
 loftiness more approachable. There is en- 
 couragement to grow, to strive, to seek for 
 the new truth. For the truth of the Bible 
 and its eternal message are not limited to 
 any set phrase nor preconceived notion of 
 its authorship. The prophet was " the mouth 
 of the Lord," and he cared little to be re- 
 
126 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 membered personally ; but was chiefly con- 
 cerned that his message should reach the 
 hearts of his people. 
 
 It has troubled many to be told that the 
 Book of Deuteronomy was probably not 
 written by Moses, but was a book contain- 
 ing much of his teaching, although written 
 probably in the reign of Manasseh. It has 
 troubled more to hear of a second Isaiah, 
 " Deutero-Isaiah, or the "Great Unknown," 
 from whose pen came, during the Exile, 
 some of the sublimest passages of that won- 
 derful Book of Isaiah. The message was the 
 same, no matter who delivered it; the moral 
 effect of the stories was the same, no matter 
 who edited the old manuscripts. To teach 
 God by history, to praise Him in song, and 
 to proclaim his warnings and his comfort- 
 ings — these were the ends that they sought 
 to reach, the goal of their ambition. 
 
 We must count among the gains of the 
 critical movement the separation of historic 
 fact from the later accretions, and also the 
 shattering of the belief that every word was 
 inspired. We have hence realized that the 
 
BIBLE AND CHILD 127 
 
 truth of the spiritual message is not impaired 
 by any scientific or historical inaccuracies in 
 the form which clothes it. The recognition 
 of this fact has taken from infidelity one of 
 its favorite arguments ; for the scoffers were 
 wont to say, " If this is the inspired word 
 of God, He does n't know as much about ' 
 the laws of this world as we men of science 
 do." But by changing the emphasis from 
 matter to spirit, we learned that the great 
 eternal truths still spoke to the heart of man. 
 What did it matter to those old chroni- 
 clers whether a king reigned exactly forty 
 years or not? About forty years was close 
 enough for them, for their object was to lay 
 stress upon the moral lessons taught by his- 
 tory, not upon the mere facts of the case, ex- 
 cept in so far as these were necessary to clothe 
 and place it. A philosophy of history with 
 Jehovah as the central cause was what they 
 were trying to set forth for their people — 
 not dates and dry chronicles. Were the Pro- 
 verbs any the less valuable summaries of the 
 wisdom of the East because Solomon did 
 not write them all? Did the Psalms cease to 
 
128 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 be the vehicle of expression for every emo- 
 tion of the pious heart that could appropriate 
 as its ownthat "poetry of friendship between 
 God and man," simply because we were 
 fairly certain that many of them were writ- 
 ten long after "the sweet singer of Israel" 
 had ceased his earthly harpings? 
 
 And although to our enlightened sense 
 there was no longer " Thus saith the Lord " 
 behind every word, yet we were more firmly 
 convinced than ever before, that "No pro- 
 phecy ever came by the will of man, but men 
 spake from God, being moved by the Holy 
 Spirit." (2 Peter i : 21.) 
 
 As a result of this certainty of belief men 
 are seeking to popularize the study of the 
 Bible. We live in a day of many versions. 
 But during the generation that has elapsed 
 since the Revised Version made its appear- 
 ance, when successive versions broke down 
 the respect for textual authority, and before 
 the constructive results of the studies of the 
 critics had been fully digested, there was a 
 period of much uncertainty, and men ceased 
 to read the Bible and to teach it to their 
 
BIBLE AND CHILD 129 
 
 children as they had once done. "Shall I 
 teach the old or the new version?" they 
 asked, bewildered; and found it easier to 
 teach nothing. As a consequence there has 
 grown up a generation of young people to 
 whom the great book, especially the Old 
 Testament, is more unfamiliar than Homer; 
 there are intelligent boys and girls of fifteen 
 who do not know who Moses was. 
 
 So dense has the ignorance become that 
 educators have finally recognized it as a de- 
 fect in our educational system and have set 
 about to remedy it. The most prominent 
 stories of the Old Testament are among the 
 requirements for college entrance. The State 
 of Indiana has arranged that pupils may 
 study the Bible outside of the public schools, 
 as they wish; but must take examinations in 
 the subject at the high school, which will 
 count one half a credit on the course of stud- 
 ies. Other States are adopting measures look- 
 ing to the same end; for since art and liter- 
 ature abound with references and allusions to 
 the Bible, a knowledge of its contents is 
 necessary to a complete education. And since 
 
I30 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 the stability of a republic depends upon the 
 righteousness and integrity of its citizens, to 
 teach these splendid ethics is recognized as 
 an obligation of citizenship. 
 
 But the years that have brought such 
 changes in the old Bible, halve changed also 
 the child whom we would reach with its 
 message. Scientific investigation has entered 
 even the nursery, and the child has been ob- 
 served and experimented upon from his first 
 day. We judge his intellectual grasp by his 
 prehensile ability at the ^ge of two weeks; 
 we have found a theory for his choice of 
 words ; and we write papers upon his first pas- 
 sion, whether it be for blue bottles or cats. 
 
 The telephone is the familiar sound of his 
 babyhood, and the graphophone has sup- 
 planted the lullaby. Pestalozzi, Froebel,and 
 Montessori have preached the doctrine of 
 child development by education, and even 
 his games are contributory to this end. Small 
 wonder is it if in general he thinks himself 
 the center of things. Surrounded by marvel- 
 ous conveniences, he wants to know, and 
 seeks to enjoy. He has very definite ideas 
 
BIBLE AND CHILD 131 
 
 of his likes and dislikes; "I want," and "I 
 like," are his constant phrases. 
 
 No new thing astonishes him, for he has 
 already grasped the marvel of aerial flight, 
 of submarine boats, of wireless telephony, 
 of electric and color photography. The 
 phonograph, once a marvel, is his toy. Nor 
 does anything long hold his interest Like 
 the Athenian of old he is seeking to hear 
 "some new thing." He has a readiness to 
 undertake new enterprises, he hails the new 
 with joy, and faces the unknown with in- 
 trepidity. He has scant reverence for any- 
 thing, and small respect for a thing because 
 of age. "What does such a custom or tra- 
 dition mean to-day? " is his question. " What 
 bearing has that teaching on my life?" is 
 his supreme inquiry, often tersely stated as 
 "What's the use?" 
 
 He does not recognize obligations easily, 
 and is restive under them. He is wiser than 
 the ancients, for his teachers are trained^ 
 alert, intelligent, encouraging questions, and 
 able to answer them. 
 / But he does not know the Bible. 
 
132 A CHILD^S RELIGION 
 
 The child of to-day learns manners from 
 the "Goops," and has his imagination stim- 
 ulated by Red, Yellow, and Blue Fairy 
 Books. He knows more of " Buster Brown" 
 than of Joseph; and the "Jungle Stories" 
 are better known than the kings of Israel. 
 A small boy overhearing a conversation 
 among his elders caught the word " Jehosh- 
 aphat," and promptly called out, " I know 
 who he was." "Who was he?" asked the 
 proud father. "The jumping kangaroo," re- 
 plied the young Kiplingite. 
 
 The old child had a Sabbath which was a 
 distinguishing mark of our American life ; 
 the new child has none. The quiet orderli- 
 ness that comes from open churches and 
 closed shops is lacking in the cities and 
 towns that he knows. Competition is keen 
 in every branch of life to-day ; it is keenest 
 in its demands for the time and attention of 
 the growing child. The pleasure-gardens, 
 the "movies," the trolley, offer attractions, 
 within the reach of all, which did not exist 
 for his brother of sixty years ago. He was 
 good on Sunday partly because there were 
 
BIBLE AND CHILD 133 
 
 no fascinating avenues open for him on that 
 day except the Sunday-School with its mu- 
 sic and comradeship. 
 
 But to-day, the new child must choose. 
 The slot machine swallows his Sunday- 
 School pennies ; the excursion by trolley or 
 automobile takes his time ; and the funny 
 page of the Sunday paper has taken the 
 place of the Sunday-School book. He lives 
 on a highly spiced diet of reading and illus- 
 tration ; he gets his information from head- 
 lines, and his opinions are formed by car- 
 toons. It is action, not thought, that attracts 
 him, and " nothing doing " is his phrase for 
 a very dull time. 
 
 It is interesting to note how common 
 these characteristics of the new child are; 
 for they belong equally to the nursery pet 
 and the street gamin. Motion, action, the 
 desire for novelty, the lack of reverence, 
 the willingness to accept the new — these 
 characterize almost every class of child to- 
 day. 
 
 Sixty years ago the deep poverty of this 
 time of economic contrasts had not arisen. 
 
134 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 The great horde of immigrants had just be- 
 gun to arrive, and furnished no problem, as 
 they were welcomed and easily assimilated. 
 And although on our Western frontier there 
 were settlements which needed the Gospel, 
 most of the children grew up in more fa- 
 vored communities. 
 
 To-day there is another variety of the 
 American child with whom we must reckon 
 and for whom we must provide. These have 
 not been born among the hills of New Eng- 
 land, nor among the palmettos of the South; 
 but Europe nurtured them and sent them to 
 us. Many of their parents were religiously 
 brought up, but their habits have suffered 
 by the change to a new land, and the break- 
 ing of old associations; and the new lan- 
 guage, which many of the adults never 
 learn, is a great impediment. 
 
 So these children of the slums grow up 
 with no teaching because of ignorance; and 
 the children of happy households get none 
 because of perplexity. "What must I be- 
 lieve ? " one of them wrote to a paper re- 
 cently. " Is there a God ? My mother says 
 
BIBLE AND CHILD 135 
 
 there is; my teacher at school says there 
 is n't ; and my father says he does n't know." 
 
 But can this Bible of ours supply any 
 need of the bright, intelligent child of to- 
 day ? — this child to whom all things seem 
 possible, and to whom the wireless telegraph 
 has taught faith in the things that cannot be 
 seen? 
 
 The new child needs the old Bible; needs 
 the touch upon his own mental powers of 
 its sublime literature; needs the language 
 of its poets to unlock his own emotions in 
 the presence of beauty and grandeur ; needs 
 its prophets to stir and direct his devotion; 
 needs to grasp the idea of "God the Al- 
 mighty Ruler " to find his own relative place 
 in the universe; needs its splendid heroism 
 to inspire his own; its zealous apostles to 
 stir his own loyalty to the noblest of causes. 
 " In the beginning, God," is a majestically 
 simple statement whose truth he needs to 
 know. 
 
 The new child is in need of a new inter- 
 pretation of the Gospel which shall fit him 
 to meet the problems of life to-day. The 
 
136 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 times demand of religion an economic Gos- 
 pel. The old benevolence and charity and 
 almsgiving, mere palliations of misery, will 
 no longer suffice to relieve the deep misery of 
 poverty and the soul deadness of those who 
 have become mere beasts of burden in our in- 
 dustrial system. He must be prepared to meet 
 also the reckless infidelity of our time, which 
 finds no God where there is no prosperity. 
 
 The children whom we train belong to 
 both of the social classes : to the prosperous 
 few from whom Agur prayed to be delivered, 
 " lest I be full and deny thee, and say, Who 
 is the Lord?" or else to the poverty-stricken 
 many, from whom also he sought escape, 
 " lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name 
 of my God in vain." (Proverbs 30: 9.) The 
 child of to-day is the reformer of to-morrow, 
 or the victim of its conditions. What can 
 we do for him? 
 
 Says Professor Royce : " There is in the 
 child a well-known disposition to idealize 
 heroes and adventures, to live an imaginary 
 life, to have ideal comrades, and to dream of 
 possible great enterprises." And he adds: "If 
 
BIBLE AND CHILD 137 
 
 I have never been fascinated by my heroes 
 and the wonders of life, it is hard to fasci- 
 nate me later with the call of duty. ... It is 
 in his fantasies then, that a child begins to 
 enter into the kingdom of heaven." ' 
 
 Will not the hero-tales of the Bible help 
 him to heed the call of duty, and so make 
 him a better citizen ? From these old tales 
 he will learn a love of country. He will ab- 
 sorb unconsciously the reverent and worship- 
 ful spirit of the Book; and surely amid the 
 rush of to-day he needs concrete illustrations 
 of what worship means; for no life is kept 
 sane without worship. 
 
 There is here for him a broad and compre- 
 hensive philosophy of history, and direct 
 teaching of the value of the individual life, 
 and its relation to history as a whole. He 
 finds here that Christian Socialism to which 
 thoughtful minds are turning as the solution 
 of our problems. For Labor and Capital, 
 united at the point of contact, then separat- 
 ing like the sides of a triangle, can be joined 
 only by Christ's teachings put into practice 
 by both. 
 
 » Philosophy of Loyalty , p, 260. 
 
138 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 A settlement worker found her class of 
 one hundred small boys divided by racial 
 animosities. She appealed to them thus: 
 "Aren't you all my children ? '' "Yes'm," 
 they chorused. " Then are n't you brothers ? " 
 she asked; and the squabbling ceased, and 
 peace settled upon the divided household. 
 "Are n't you brothers?" the Bible is saying 
 to its readers; and it takes the child back in 
 spiritual lineage to his Father, God; so that 
 the child trained in the Bible feels himself, 
 as one of them put it, "Kin to God." 
 
 An age which is trying to put a moral in- 
 terpretation upon even the rhymes of Mother 
 Goose, and to read a spiritual import into 
 everything, can surely find no fitter vehicle 
 for such teaching than these stories. The 
 supernatural becomes the natural to a child 
 so trained, and faith is easy for him; and it 
 is "the things which are not seen" which are 
 eternal. 
 
 It is obvious that if we are to reach the 
 new child with the old Bible, we must give 
 it to him in its most enlightened form. For 
 the Bible has an appeal for the new child. 
 
BIBLE AND CHILD 139 
 
 and if he does not find it, the fault is ours, 
 not his. 
 
 He needs the book in its most recent form 
 in order that he may associate it more easily 
 with his own life; that its characters may 
 have a vital interest for him; for the child 
 of to-day deals with realities. The child's 
 readiness to accept the new, and his very ignor- 
 ance of the older form of the Bible, make it 
 easy to teach him the new Bible. 
 
 The chief obstacle to bringing the old Bible 
 and the new child into right relations lies in 
 the fact that the older child has not studied 
 the new Bible enough to appreciate it and 
 present it to him. We might as well be St. 
 Simeon Stylites on his pillar above the mar- 
 ket-place, as to try to teach the modern child 
 if we dissociate ourselves from the current 
 life, the current thought of to-day. For the 
 thought generations change more quickly 
 among children than among adults; and the 
 new teaching is in the air, and has tinged 
 all their studies. We must meet the atti- 
 tude to life of the present-day child if we are 
 to teach him. 
 
I40 A CHILD'S RELIGION 
 
 This, then, is the duty laid upon us; to 
 teach the new Bible to the new child, that 
 we may give him the right historical per- 
 spective for his future ; that we may impress 
 upon him that the Eternal purpose may be 
 worked out even by human politics, for the 
 Lord " maketh even the wrath of man to serve 
 him"; and above all must he learn that we 
 cannot be a righteous nation unless as indi- 
 viduals we are loyal soldiers in the service 
 of the King. For the joy of living is loving, 
 and the joy of loving is serving. Whom shall 
 these children serve if not the Lord Jesus 
 Christ; and how shall they serve unless they 
 love Him ; and how shall they know and love, 
 unless we teach them? 
 
 Scholarship and knowledge may be re- 
 quired to teach these lessons; but it must be 
 knowledge born of experience and scholar- 
 ship illumined by the teaching of the Holy 
 Spirit, if it is to reach and help the children 
 of to-day. 
 
 I once asked a distinguished surgeon, 
 "Are you ever nervous about undertaking 
 an operation?" He answered, "I think only 
 
BIBLE AND CHILD 141 
 
 of the need of help, and forget everything 
 else." 
 
 So must it be with us. Let us not hold 
 back from teaching because of our imperfec- 
 tions, if only we have quickened souls: the 
 need is so great. Rather let us focus our 
 thought upon these children, in whose hands 
 lie the to-morrows of history ; these who are to 
 be the statesmen who shall achieve, and the 
 poets who, hearing "the call of the flute of 
 the Great Beyond," shall interpret it to their 
 time ; from these shall come the prophets to 
 whom shall be given the fuller revelation of 
 God, if by our efforts they have been fitted 
 to receive it. 
 
 The little child is sitting, where the Mas- 
 ter placed him, in the midst of us. The ages 
 are in his keeping; his training is in ours. 
 
 THE END 
 
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