INT^CONTACT 
 N TEACHING 
 
 TTERSON Du BoiS
 
 Southern Branch 
 of the 
 
 University of California 
 
 Los Angeles i
 
 'his book is DUE on the last date stamp 
 
 i 
 
 ■ ly
 
 The Point of Contact in Teaching
 
 /^>' 
 
 v> 
 
 The 
 
 Point of Contact 
 In Teachini 
 
 BY 
 
 PATTERSON DUBOIS 
 
 Formerly a Secretary of the American Philosophical Society 
 
 Fellow of the American Association for the 
 
 Advancement of Science, etc. 
 
 FOURTH EDITION REVISED AND ENLARCEC 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 DODD, MEAD tS: COMPANY 
 
 1901 
 
 35005
 
 CoPYRir.HT, iSq6 AKO 1900 
 
 BY 
 
 PATTERSON DU BOIS
 
 L CL 
 377 
 
 By the same author 
 Beckonings from Little Hands
 
 PREFACE 
 
 The child mind is a castle that can be ^ 
 taken neither by stealth nor by storm. But 
 there is a natural way of approach and a gate 
 of easy entry always open to him who knows 
 how to find it. 
 
 The ideal point at which a child's intel- 
 ligent attention is to be first engaged, or his 
 instruction is to begin, is an experience or »/ 
 point of contact with life. One who under- 
 stands this truth need seldom have any great 
 difliculty in getting an entry into the child's 
 mind. 
 
 This little manual is an expansion of a 
 small monograph issued in 1896 under the 
 title " Beginning at the Point of Contact," 
 Being written originally in the interest of 
 better educational standards in the Sunday- 
 school it won its way into request by the 
 primary workers. But certain secular normal- 
 
 V
 
 VI PREFACE, 
 
 school teachers, discovering its general edu- 
 cational utility, quickly appropriated a large 
 part of the edition. 
 
 With the demand for republication came 
 the suggestion that amplification would in- 
 crease its practical value. The new matter 
 now forms so considerable a part of the 
 whole as to render the present manual prac- 
 tically a new work. Numerous illustrative 
 examples have been included, showing how 
 the principle has been applied in dealing with 
 individual pupils, with classes, with schools, 
 and even with peoples in more or less primi- 
 tive stages of life. 
 
 The dissertation on the construction of 
 primary Bible courses is reserved for the last 
 chapter, as not being necessary to the mere 
 exposition of the general principle, but as be- 
 ing a legitimate outcome and illustration of it. 
 
 Augmt^ 1896.
 
 PREFACE TO FOURTH EDITION 
 
 Since the first issue of " The Point of 
 Contact in Teaching," it has come into large 
 use by various classes of secular as well as re- 
 ligious teachers, no less than by writers of 
 Sunday-school lesson courses and lesson helps. 
 It has attracted the attention of kindergartners 
 and normal schools, and has gained a place in 
 at least one divinity school. Like all key 
 phrases or catchwords, its title has suffered 
 some deterioration from loose use or over use 
 where its real significance has not been per- 
 fectly understood. On the other hand, the 
 author has found the title adopted and rightly 
 applied, as a working principle, by special 
 teachers and students among whom the book 
 was scarcely expected to circulate, much less 
 to prove popular. 
 
 It therefore seemed best to thoroughly re- 
 vise the book, with the twofold purpose of
 
 Vlii PREFACE TO FOURTH EDITION. 
 
 making still more emphatic and clear just 
 what the "point of contact" at the "plane 
 of experience " means, and of illustrating the 
 universality of the essential principle in teach- 
 ing or reaching all sorts and conditions ot un- 
 tutored minds, from the innocent child in our 
 homes and primary schools to the barbarian 
 of the mission field. 
 
 This has necessitated considerable change, 
 both by excision and by expansion. Certain 
 matters of temporary interest have been 
 eliminated in favor of those aspects of the 
 subject which are of permanent and universal 
 import. The book is nevertheless substan- 
 tially the same, though fuller and more com- 
 plete in demonstration. There is no variance 
 in essential purport between the first three 
 editions and this revision. 
 
 Aprils 1900.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I 
 
 The General Principle . . . i 
 
 II 
 
 The Plane of Experience . . 19 
 
 III 
 Applying the Principle . . • A7 
 
 IV 
 
 Missing the Point . , . '83 
 
 V 
 
 The Lesson Material . , . loi
 
 I 
 
 THE GENERAL PRINCIPLE
 
 THE GENERAL PRINCIPLE 
 
 *' In the beginning God created the heaven 
 and the earth," — but for me he created them 
 not until he created me. Heaven and earth 
 had no beginning, so far as I am concerned, 
 until my powers of perceiving them had their 
 beginning. So, although as a newborn in- 
 fant I am the latest act of God's work of 
 creation, my experience, my contact with 
 life, is my book of beginnings. Heaven and 
 earth start into existence in my home, my 
 parents, my baby-rattle. In my chronology, 
 my father's gold watch precedes the sun, a 
 silver dollar antedates the moon, and my 
 mother's jewels anticipate the stars. My 
 world is without form, and void. But by 
 this I mean not what the Bible Book of 
 Genesis means. 
 
 Things grad'iallv assume shape as I per- 
 
 3
 
 4 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 ceive their relations, and come to know them 
 through my personal experience. The sea- 
 sons, you say, have their beginning in the 
 movement of the earth around the sun, but 
 that movement has its beginning for me in 
 the seasons. The light of day has its real 
 beginning in the sun, but for me the sun has 
 its beginning in the light of day. My infan- 
 tile experience is my infantile book of begin- 
 nings, — my Genesis. 
 
 That u^hich is historically first may be 
 logically last, and what is logically first may 
 be historically last ; or, as Aristotle puts it, 
 " that which is first as cause is last in dis- 
 covery." The Creation as recorded in the 
 Bible comes historically before my birth ; but 
 logically my knowledge of the sun must be- 
 gin with the light in my room, my study of 
 the rock strata must begin with the stones 
 in the garden path ; of the waters, with my 
 morning bath ; of the animals, with my pussy 
 or the flies. It is the proximate and the im- 
 mediate rather than the remote and the final 
 that appeals to me as a child.
 
 THE GENERAL PRINCIPLE. 5 
 
 Not only do these illustrations represent a 
 cardinal principle of approach to the little 
 child's mind, but to a large extent they indi- 
 cate the only royal road to success, the " line 
 of least resistance " in dealing with those 
 primitive and untutored peoples who are in- 
 fants in knowledge of any kind. 
 
 Nothing is so truly known as that which is 
 known through a self-active personal ex- 
 perience. " Know that thou hast no knowl- 
 edge but what thou hast got by working," 
 says Carlyle. Therefore it is at a point in 
 this £xperiential knowing that we can begin 
 to instruct the child to the best advantage. 
 Indeed, it is only where we touch his life in- 
 terests that we can be said to instruct him at 
 all. It is doubtful whether, strictly speak- 
 ing, we can even be said to create interests in 
 others. As Miss Harriet M. Scott startlingly 
 says, "The most we can do is to expand or 
 enrich an already existent interest." This 
 point in life interests or experiences I call the 
 Point of Contact, because it is the point at 
 which the child's experience and the lesson
 
 6 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 he is to learn can be brought into contact 
 with each other, — or, better, the one evolved 
 from the other. Starting with something 
 which the child knows through experience, 
 and is therefore personally interested in, the 
 subject is thenceforth to be progressively de- 
 veloped. If this development of new truth 
 is really a legitimate unfolding, a " natural 
 development of his own interests, it is his 
 own, it is really himself." 
 
 We must begin where we find the child, — 
 as Colonel Parker puts it. The only place 
 where we can be sure to find him is at some 
 point on the plane of a child's natural experi- 
 ences or contact with life. It is of no use to 
 start with an abstract statement, motto, text 
 or doctrine of any kind. Every one must do 
 his own abstracting. Out of the concrete, 
 objective experiences of life only can we de- 
 duce or generalize our abstractions of knowl- 
 edge. An experience may be non-sensuous, 
 internal, — emotional, or spiritual, it is true, 
 — but with this we have comparatively little 
 to do in our first approach to the child mind.
 
 THE GENERAL PRINCIPLE. "] 
 
 It is at the point of the child's sense contact 
 with the external world that the opportunity 
 for our best appeal to him lies. All imagery 
 must be made of the raw material furnished 
 by the sense perception.^ And be it re- 
 
 ' Pestalozzi says : " The starting-point of thought is 
 sense impression, — the direct impression, that is, pro- 
 duced by the world on our internal and external senses. 
 ... It is life that educates." This is altogether a dif- 
 ferent thing from addressing our primary instruction to 
 sense perception as such. As Dr. William T. Harris 
 says : " Thought deals with the dynamic element of ex- 
 perience rather than with mere things, which are only 
 static results." We are quite on the child's plane of ex- 
 perience when we address his sense of wonder, curiosity, 
 love, or fear. But we know less of those points in his 
 experience, and cannot often be so sure that we are 
 making a close contact with his real experiential life as 
 we can when we seek a point of departure in his obvious 
 natural experience with the external world. Notwith- 
 standing the great differences between Pestalozzi and 
 Froebel this principle is not essentially at variance with 
 either. It is true that Miss Blow sharply contrasts these 
 two greatest masters as to their pivotal ideas when she 
 says : " Pestalozzi claims that the centre from which 
 education radiates is sense perception {Atisc/iauutig). 
 Froebel claims that this centre is Gendith, a word ex- 
 plained by Hegel to mean the ' undeveloped, indefinite
 
 8 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 membered here that, as Professor Dewey says, 
 " the image is the great instrument of instruc- 
 tion. What a child gets out of any subject 
 presented to him is simply the images which 
 he himself forms with regard to it." 
 
 What Miss Blow calls the " point of de- 
 parture " is simply the starting-point in the 
 teaching process ; but this point of departure 
 must be at the child's point of contact with 
 experiential life. In looking for this point 
 let us not forget the words of Rousseau : 
 " Childhood has ways of seeing, thinking, 
 feeling, peculiar to itself; nothing is more 
 absurd than to wish to substitute ours in their 
 place." 
 
 The idea of the relative value of possible 
 
 totality of spiritual being.' We may approximately 
 translate Gemiith by ' heart,' and affirm that with Froebel 
 the pivot upon which true education turns is the regener. 
 ation of the affections." But it is also true that in 
 Froebel's mother-play " the point of departure is usually 
 some actual experience of the children." However, 
 there is no intention of entering here upon a philo- 
 sophical discussion, but merely to point out a practical 
 way of approach to and procedure with the child mind.
 
 THE GENERAL PRINCIPLE. 9 
 
 Starting-points for the child's development as 
 determined by their closeness or familiarity to 
 the child through his own experience, is well 
 illustrated in a discussion between Miss 
 Youmans and Dr. Mary P. Jacobi in the 
 matter of teaching botany to children. The 
 noticeable thing is that the child is to ap- 
 proach the science in a direction opposite to, 
 or at least different from, that from which the 
 mature scientist approaches it. For the child, 
 that point of the plant's life which is out of 
 sight, underground, is logically, or peda- 
 gogically, late, although in the plant's history 
 it is first. 
 
 An article on " The Scientific Method 
 with Children " in The Popular Science 
 Monthly, by Henry Lincoln Clapp, says 
 rhildren " have their own starting-points, and 
 these should be taken by the teacher. . . . 
 Dr. Jacobi would use the flower, in beginning 
 to teach children botany, because it is the 
 most attractive, makes the largest impression 
 upon the senses, is easy of apprehension, and 
 leads to the appreciation of specific differ-
 
 10 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 ences. . . . Miss Youmans would begin with 
 the leaf, on the assumption that it is simpler 
 than the flower, and, in tracing its scientific 
 relations, deeper intellectual pleasure is re- 
 ceived. . . . Beginning with roots, as so 
 many systematic teachers have done, and fol- 
 lowing with stem, leaves, flowers, and ending 
 with fruits as the ultimate work of the plant, 
 although logical to adults, full of regular 
 sequences, and scientific from one stand- 
 point, is unscientific from another. 
 
 " Children do not start to work with plants 
 in that way unless they are obliged to, but in 
 a way diametrically opposite, — attractive 
 flowers and fruits first, and unattractive roots 
 last. It is certainly natural, although it may 
 be heathenish, and show their natural de- 
 pravity, for them to do so. . . . An exten- 
 sive use of imported material is directly op- 
 posed to Agassiz's injunction to use the 
 material nearest at hand. Moreover, it is 
 worth while to remember that materials and 
 methods which are serviceable enough in 
 teaching adults often become forced and me-
 
 THE GFNERAL PRINCIPLE. II 
 
 chanical in teaching children. It should not 
 be taken for granted that the teacher's se- 
 quences, laboriously studied out, . . . are the 
 pupil's sequences, or that he can assimilate 
 them." 
 
 Now the great fault in our religious teach- 
 ing of the child has been that we have not 
 sought his most penetrable point. Our ap- 
 proach to him has been through adult ideas, 
 upon an adult plane, complicated with con- 
 ventionality, institutionalism, and abstrac- 
 tions. We have not sufficiently regarded the 
 plane of his experience as the essential way 
 of approach to him. Observe, I do not lo- 
 cate this plane as either high or low; it is 
 neither, and it is both, according to what 
 your terms mean. It is in some ways higher 
 than ours, in some ways lower. Let that 
 pass. 
 
 We have stood upon our adult plane of 
 complex thought and conventionality to 
 manipulate the little child's current of thought 
 running on a very different plane. True, wc 
 have spoken baby-talk to him, but in that
 
 12 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 baby-language we have spoken to him truths 
 unsuited to babies, and because he was 
 seemingly entertained with our antics we sup- 
 posed that we succeeded in our effort to make 
 an adult baby of him. Our Lord did not 
 teach in that way. See how he made the 
 people think by finding their point of contact 
 with their common occupations and surround- 
 ings, and proceeding from this starting-point to 
 whatever truth he had in view for them. 
 Like him, we must address pupils on the 
 level of their experiential life. 
 
 We have made too much, for instance, of 
 time sequences. The young child has a very 
 inadequate conception of chronology. History 
 as history — a record of impersonal, or intri- 
 cately related events, of remote causes and ef- 
 fects — is wholly out of his plane. His se- 
 quences are of a different sort. So, too, we 
 have made too much of points of doctrine 
 and forms of theological reasoning, and of an 
 objective life utterly foreign and remote from 
 child experience. A writer in The Church 
 Standard, C. E. Hutchison, says: "We have
 
 THE GENERAL PRINCIPLE. I3 
 
 lessons in the Catechism crammed with words 
 over which grown people have been fighting 
 for centuries, and about which they do not 
 yet agree. And there are laborious series on 
 the Bible, full of information about the 
 structure of Jewish houses, the order of serv- 
 ice in the synagogue, suggestions for special 
 investigation, and the like." The child's 
 plane, on the contrary, is level only to the 
 activities and appreciations of immediate life. 
 
 Leaders in educational and pedagogical 
 thought have long seen the radical defect in 
 our Sunday-school, as indeed in all our re- 
 ligious instruction of the little children. The 
 Sunday-school has been severely criticised as 
 an educational institution. Notwithstanding 
 the truth in such criticism we know the Sun- 
 day-school to be one of the grandest and most 
 aggressive of Christian institutions. But we 
 ought not to be above learning from our 
 critics. An article some years ago in The 
 Westminster Review gives forth no uncertain 
 sound, thus : 
 
 " Theology should not be forced upon the
 
 14 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 child's mind at a very early age. ... A 
 child's first idea of spiritual things, if these 
 are presented to him in the phraseology 
 usually employed for the purpose, is neces- 
 sarily a false one, made so by his natural sub- 
 stitution of the concrete for the abstract. 
 This fact often receives practical confirma- 
 tion from the quaint notions children are 
 found to have formed about religion ; the ab- 
 surdity of the questions to which these notions 
 give rise is a frequent cause of amusement to 
 their elders, but it none the less furnishes con- 
 clusive evidence of the confusion that prevails 
 in many little minds. Premature instruction 
 relating to the spiritual side of religion thus 
 leads the child into errors which have to be 
 corrected by subsequent experience, and the 
 false ideas resulting from it form an unde- 
 sirable starting-point in religious instruction." 
 Where, then, will the desirable starting- 
 point be found ? In the general range or on 
 the plane of characteristic childhood experiences^ 
 and especially those which arise from the child's 
 immediate contact with the external world. Out
 
 THE GENERAL PRINCIPLE. I5 
 
 of the child's own self-active life must come 
 that which makes knowledge power — or, bet- 
 ter, which transmutes mere instruction or in- 
 formation into personal efficiency. Life is 
 the great interpreter and educator. 
 
 Here let it be said, once for all, that in this 
 manual " the child " usually means a child 
 under eight years of age. Years do not regu- 
 late everything, but they do regulate some 
 things. Span of time is an essential to the 
 reaching of a certain plane of experience, a 
 certain sight-level, a grade of development. 
 A forced cultivation of brain cells, natural 
 precocity or intelligence, will never put a 
 child just where an accumulation of con- 
 scious years will. A child or a man may be 
 such a prodigy in arithmetic as to make gi- 
 gantic calculations in a moment of time. He 
 may have such a phenomenal memory that he 
 can repeat verbatim the contents of a news- 
 paper after one reading. He may have 
 powers like these, and yet be dependent on 
 common experience for just that development 
 which such experience alone can bring. He
 
 1 6 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 must have a sense of the process of time, or 
 of conscious intervals, behind him, in order to 
 have a definite historic consciousness. And 
 the younger the child the more applicable is 
 this truth of child nature. 
 
 In his outlook and in his general mental 
 method a child of six is farther from a child 
 of ten or twelve than a child of twelve is 
 from a young man of twenty. A child of 
 six and a normal child of nine should not be 
 in a class together. 
 
 The general principle, then, is, that in the 
 child's instruction we must begin at his point 
 of contact with objective or external life as 
 he sees it. Life, it is true, includes the inner 
 experiences, — appetites, desires, affections, 
 etc. — as well as those which are sensory and 
 peripheral. But it is in the region of the 
 latter, it is upon the plane of those experi- 
 ences which he gets in his sense contact with 
 the external world, that we must usually 
 start with him. The inner life of intentions, 
 emotions, affections, appreciations, must not 
 be turned back on itself for objective con-
 
 THE GENERAL PRINCIPLE. I7 
 
 templation. A child loves, fears, hates, en- 
 joys ; but he does not mentally handle enjoy- 
 ment, hatred, fear, or love, objectively. The 
 child's prime interest is in the concrete ob- 
 ject of sense. This is well illustrated by the 
 study of children's letters. I quote from an 
 article on this subject in The (London) 
 Spectator (September 23, 1893). The writer 
 says : 
 
 " Children's letters are always concrete. They write 
 about what they are doing, not about what they are 
 thinking, and at greater length about the achievements 
 of other people and animals than about their own. 
 Looking through a pile of old letters from children, 
 mostly girls of all ages, from four to thirteen, the writer 
 finds nearly three-quarters devoted to careful accounts of 
 cats, dogs, tame mice, a donkey, ' Joey,' a ' ginipig,' 
 ' rabits,' chickens, goats, and innumerable pigeons. 
 There is hardly a word about themselves or their feelings 
 in the whole collection, though the health, wants, and 
 probable sentiments of the animals are treated at great 
 length and with every diversity of spelling. Lists of 
 * what the pigeons have got,' such as ' the fantail, two 
 babies and one egg ; the Jocobin, two eggs,' and so on, 
 are followed by other lists of • ones that have got no- 
 body.'"
 
 1 8 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 That the child's experiences are concrete 
 rather than abstract, simple rather than com- 
 plex, immediate rather than remote, will be 
 more fully illustrated in the next chapter.
 
 II 
 
 THE PLANE OF EXPERIENCE
 
 II 
 
 THE PLANE OF EXPERIENCE 
 
 As a practical matter, the point of entry to 
 any child's mind depends upon the indi- 
 viduality of his life ; but in dealing with 
 classes we must make sacrifices of the in- 
 dividual for the many. Of course we lose in 
 effectiveness by this, and, so far, the single 
 pupil is the ideal class. But, on the con- 
 trary, the single pupil loses the advantage of 
 the social relation. All class teaching is 
 therefore a compromise process. 
 
 We can appeal to childhood from the gen- 
 eral plane or ordinary range of experiences 
 most characteristic of childhood. Says H. 
 Courthope Bowen, "What interests a child 
 must be immediate and level to his thoughts. 
 He cannot realize a far-off advantage ; or, at 
 any rate, he cannot feel it for long. Young 
 and old, we all experience delight in discover- 
 
 21
 
 22 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 ing, or in being helped to see, connections 
 between isolated facts, — especially such as we 
 have ourselves picked up." 
 
 Manifestly the plane of experience, the 
 germination of interest, the genesis of study, 
 will be a simple, rather than a complex, con- 
 crete rather than abstract. As Lange says, 
 " the numerous concrete, fresh, and strong 
 ideas gained in earliest youth are the best 
 helps to apperception for all subsequent learn- 
 ing." But these germinal ideas have no af- 
 filiation with the "regular sequences" of 
 theology ; they will not be found in the local, 
 political, or religious issues, or the imagery 
 of Ezekiel, Haggai, Zechariah, Nehemiah, 
 Nahum, Micah, or Habakkuk, or the com- 
 plex rituals and regulations of the A4osaic 
 era. Supposing "the elders of the Jews" 
 did build and prosper " through the prophe- 
 sying of Haggai the prophet and Zechariah 
 the son of Iddo," — what is that to a babe 
 who has no conception of space, time, organ- 
 ized society, or even of our commonest adult 
 conventionalities ? How near are the Ten
 
 THE PLANE OF EXPERIENCE. 23 
 
 Commandments to the plane of experience of 
 a child who cannot count up to ten — nor 
 above four ? 
 
 Nor is there experimental contact in such 
 a "golden text" as "The Lord thy God 
 will turn thy captivity, and have compassion 
 upon thee;" nor in "We made our prayer 
 unto our God, and set a watch against them." 
 Even for such a text as " The preaching of 
 the cross is to them that perish foolishness, 
 but unto us which are saved it is the power 
 of God," one requires considerable prior 
 knowledge before it can be assimilated into 
 the life and become formative of character. 
 To force these on the child is what that re- 
 markable teacher, Thring of Uppingham, 
 would call " an effort to pour into a reluctant 
 mind some unintelligible bit of cipher knowl- 
 edge and to cork it down by punishment. It 
 disagrees, it ferments, the cork flies out, the 
 noxious stuff is spilt ; whilst the taskmaster 
 believes it is all right because of the trouble 
 he took to get it in." 
 
 Deliberately to select a Scripture portion
 
 24 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 SO remote from the plane of experience of 
 little children, and then suppose that, because 
 it is God's Word, God will work a miracle 
 in order that they may understand it, seems 
 hardly less than presumptuous mockery. The 
 responsibility is upon us to see that truths are 
 presented to the children in an order consist- 
 ent with their capability to receive those 
 truths through experiential beginnings. And 
 this is not to be done by paraphernalia, or by 
 parrot verbal memorizing, or by the awaken- 
 ing of a pseudo attention through mere spec- 
 tacular exhibits of hearts, ladders, crosses, 
 crowns, and blackboard intricacies which 
 might make an adult dizzy if they did not be- 
 wilder children. 
 
 Take this text, which, before now, has 
 been given to little children : "Giving thanks 
 unto the Father, which hath made us meet to 
 be partakers of the inheritance of the saints 
 in light." How absurd to attempt to force a 
 conception here ! Let us not decei\e our- 
 selves into thinking that such memorizings 
 have a future value. Says Froebel : "At a
 
 THE PLANE OF EXPERIENCE. 25 
 
 later period of life, when comprehension at- 
 taches a sense to the sound, the senseless word 
 will be the more injurious." 
 
 To say that a child has enjoyed committing 
 to memory — or any other task, for that mat- 
 ter — proves little. Nothing is more seductive 
 to the teacher than the child's enjoyment or 
 delight in his task. Not that he should not 
 delight in it, but the delight may entirely 
 mislead us as to its cause. " It is possible," 
 says President G. Stanley Hall, " that the 
 present shall be so attractive and preoccupy- 
 ing that the child never once sends his 
 thoughts to the remote in time and place." 
 This "present" may be mere verbal jingle, 
 it may be the artificial paraphernalia of the 
 primary room, or anything but the concept 
 which the adult observer is laboring to lodge 
 in a mind impenetrable to it. 
 
 The points of contact of most children 
 with the worlds of matter and of thought are 
 at once numerous and few. Investigations 
 conducted under the direction of President 
 Hall upon large numbers of Boston school-
 
 26 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 children, just after they had entered the low- 
 est grade of the primary school, say six years 
 old, revealed that 35 per cent, had never seen 
 the country, 20 per cent, did not know where 
 milk came from, 55 per cent, did not know 
 that wooden things were made from trees, 47 
 per cent, never saw a pig, from 13 to 18 per 
 cent, did not know where their cheek, fore- 
 head, or throat was, and fewer yet knew 
 elbow, wrist, ribs, etc. More than three- 
 fourths of the children had never seen, to 
 know them, any of the common cereals, 
 trees, or vegetables, growing. These facts 
 indicate how slenderly furnished the child's 
 mind is for a discussion involving theologies, 
 chronologies, successive wars, political com- 
 plications, Judaizing tendencies, obscure im- 
 ageries and prophetic references, ancient ritual 
 usages, tribal dissensions, and the like. 
 
 President Hall well asks, " What idea can 
 the 18 per cent, of children who thought a 
 cow no larger than its picture, get from all 
 instruction about hide, horns, milk ? " This 
 is a pertinent question, mutatis mutandis^ for
 
 THE PLANE OF EXPERIENCE. I"] 
 
 whoever is to make lesson-courses for our 
 primary Sunday-schools, even more than for 
 those who are to teach them. To tell the 
 average six-year old that " the price of a 
 virtuous woman is far above rubies," simple 
 as it sounds to us, presupposes an experience 
 in the matter of relative values, of precious 
 stones, of marketable abstractions. Is this any 
 better than teaching about the unknown cow 
 by an account of unknown horns, hide, etc. ? 
 
 In the same line of revelation as Dr. 
 Hall's, Superintendent O. J. Laylander pro- 
 pounded such plain questions as " Why 
 should we do good ? " " What is Sunday 
 for?" "Where is heaven?" "What do 
 children do in heaven ? " " What do the 
 angels do ? " to children varying from six to 
 ten years. Here are a few specimen answers. 
 " Angels wear plain white clothes, and don't 
 look stylish." " Have nice hair and wear 
 nice gowns." " Angels come down and tell 
 men when they burn sheep what to do." 
 
 Other answers, about the Divine appear- 
 ance, etc., while they are net irreverent, seem
 
 28 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 almost shocking to us, and need not be repeated 
 here ; it is natural for the child to be concrete 
 and direct. One does not have to look far to 
 discover the sensuous origin of most, if not 
 all, of these answers, — perhaps not outside 
 of some of our homes and Sunday-schools. 
 Some of them are at least a serious reflection 
 on the advisability of displaying crude chro- 
 mes or any other form of portraiture of our 
 Lord. It is indeed a question how far the 
 picturing of spirit is advisable. To the child's 
 imagination such a draught is more likely to 
 be narcotic than stimulating. It is often 
 better that a hero be left unpictured or unseen. 
 It is easy to see that the ideally exact point 
 of departure or genesis of a child's education 
 in any sphere is an experience, or contact 
 with the world, peculiar to that child. For 
 a certain little girl's recitation from Long- 
 fellow I chose a part of the potter's song in 
 " Keramos " — with great success. But this 
 was largely because she had visited a potter)', 
 and had come into actual sense contact with, 
 and so acquired an interest in, the processes
 
 THE PLANE OF EXPERIENCE. 29 
 
 of the potter's wheel. And yet she was not 
 a potter's daughter and in two or three years 
 her recollection of the visit to the pottery be- 
 came dim — and with it her remembrance of 
 the poem also faded. The potter's wheel was 
 not strictly in the plane of her experience 
 even though she had been once in her life an 
 interested spectator of it. Yet, if a recitation 
 from Longfellow must be made, this was the 
 best approach to a point of contact with her 
 life that was available. Does not much of 
 our scriptural teaching similarly die out be- 
 cause it has been fundamentally inapt to the 
 child's plane of ordinary experience ? 
 
 The more closely anything lies to our per- 
 sonal experience, and the nearer it is to the 
 level of our ordinary vision, the more easily 
 do we become interested in it, and the better 
 starting-point is it, therefore, from which to 
 follow a line of thought. This is not pecul- 
 iar to the child, but is common to all. The 
 range of experience is much more extensive 
 in the adult than in the child. Every one 
 knows that, when he has been through a par-
 
 30 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 ticular form of experience, he has always a 
 peculiar interest in others who are passing 
 through that same experience. A person who 
 has been rescued from a burning building in 
 the middle of the night will run to the win- 
 dow to see the fire department go by, when, 
 previously to his rescue, he would have paid 
 very little attention to it. A person who has 
 contracted what he supposes to be an unusual 
 disease is surprised to discover many other 
 persons who have been, or are, afflicted in 
 the same way. 
 
 Let me illustrate now a little more particu- 
 larly this matter of the plane of experience, 
 or levels of sight, or points of view. 
 
 My friend Mrs. B., after the lawn was 
 mowed, quoted to her husband, " He shall 
 come down like rain upon the mown grass " 
 (Ps. Ixxii. 6). Mr. B., who had been brought 
 up on a farm, and was accustomed to regard 
 rain upon grass which was drying into hay as 
 deleterious, never was able to get any spir- 
 itual use out of this text. His point of con- 
 tact was with his experience as a haymaker.
 
 THE PLANE OF EXPERIENCE. 3I 
 
 Mrs. B.'s was with her experience as a lawn- 
 keeper. Consequently they had not inter- 
 preted the verse in the same way. One had 
 applied it to the grass that was cut off for 
 hay ; the other, to the remaining grass from 
 which the hay had been cut. In each case 
 life was the interpreter and educator. 
 
 Again, an intelligent and studious child in 
 her ninth year was, with her father's assis- 
 tance, studying the Sunday-school lesson on 
 " The Cities of Refuge." She had never heard 
 the word "refuge," and her father explained, 
 as well as he could, first what the idea of 
 refuge is, and then what a city of refuge was. 
 She went to Sunday-school, and the teacher, 
 in order to vivify the lesson, told a dreadful 
 story of the torture which some boys had 
 inflicted upon a companion. The child was 
 so shocked by the horror that it was some 
 time before it lost its hold on her nerves. 
 The idea of the city of refuge seemed to 
 have made no impression on her at all, al- 
 though it was, of course, explained to her a 
 second time in the class.
 
 32 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 Six months later she visited the old fort at 
 St. Augustine. It was altogether a different 
 sort of thing from what she supposed a fort 
 to be. In discussing it with her father, the 
 various wars in which it had played a part 
 were spoken of, and then the father said that 
 it had done great service as a place of refuge 
 for the inhabitants of the adjacent town dur- 
 ing an attack by the Indians. The child im- 
 mediately asked, " What is a refuge ? " The 
 explanations of the term which she had re- 
 ceived a half-year before had gone for noth- 
 ing. The father tried to recall the Bible les- 
 son of the previous term, but to little purpose. 
 Refuges, as such, had not come within the 
 plane of her experience until now, and hence 
 the definition of them, and the lesson upon 
 them, amounted to little. There had been 
 no experiential life to act as interpreter. The 
 explanation had to be made over again with 
 the object in actual view, the father recalling 
 the lesson on the cities of refuge and so es- 
 tablishing a life connection. 
 
 Now let •** look at the plane of experience
 
 THE PLANE OF EXPERIENCE. 33 
 
 in this case, and the relative degrees of im- 
 mediateness to, or remoteness from, the child's 
 circumstantial interest. Being herself a tem- 
 porary inhabitant of the town as a visitor, the 
 flight of the inhabitants to the fort for refuge 
 came closely within the range of her imagina- 
 tion — or fancied experience. It is true she 
 had never experienced such an event as a 
 flight for life, but she was close enough to 
 the conditions to be able — by raising herself, 
 through her imagination, on her tiptoes, 
 metaphorically — to come fairly within sight 
 of the experience of a refugee. 
 
 Again, suppose she had actually been her- 
 self a refugee from the Indians in a place of 
 safety. The idea of the fort as a place of 
 refuge would have been far more vivid, more 
 intensely real. In either case there was an 
 excellent point of contact with experience 
 from which to teach the idea of refuge in 
 time of danger. But in one case the contact 
 would have been closer than in the other. In 
 one instance, she had sufficient sensory 
 knowledge of the place to imagine the ex-
 
 34 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 perience with fair correctness ; in the other, 
 she would have had an actual experience. 
 But without some such basis any instruction 
 would have conveyed little impression. In 
 the Sunday-school class the city of refuge had 
 no basis whatever in life experience, and what 
 the imagination could do, therefore, was so 
 weak that it soon dropped out of her mental 
 furniture. 
 
 Let us now take another case showing a 
 conscious resistance of the child to the at- 
 tempt to force upon him truths of nature by 
 bringing them wrong end foremost or foreign 
 to his experiential plane. I condense and 
 quote from an article by Mrs. Mary C. Cut- 
 ler in The Sunday School Times. She tells 
 of an enthusiastic high-school girl who, hav- 
 ing become interested in geology, decided to 
 use her knowledge as the basis of bedtime 
 tales for her little brother. 
 
 " Wouldn't Kobliie like to have each night a part of a 
 great, long story, all about how the earth was made?" 
 she asked one evening soon afterward. 
 
 " P'raps so," he answered, somewhat doubtfully.
 
 THE PLANE OF EXPERIENCE-. 35 
 
 " Will you tell how the sidewalks weie made ? " he 
 added, seeming a little more interested. 
 
 " Oh, yes ! " replied his sister ; " only we want to 
 know first how the ground was made to lay the side- 
 walks on." 
 
 And so the story had gone on night after night, while 
 Robbie had shown varying degrees of interest, but never 
 quite so much as his sister had expected. She tried her 
 best to adapt the story to his comprehension, and some- 
 times felt much encouraged ; as when she was telling 
 about the formation of the coal-beds, and showed him a 
 piece of coal she had found, which seemed to have 
 markings on it like the bark of a tree ; or, at another 
 time, when she showed him a picture of the huge bird- 
 tracks that had been found in other formations. 
 
 But now and then Robbie would ask some question 
 about the sidewalks, showing that his interest was cen- 
 tred on that with which he had first become acquainted 
 in experience. The sidewalks were his " point of con- 
 tact " with, and his first interest in, earth structure. It 
 was because he hoped to learn some time how the side- 
 walks were made, that he was trying to listen patiently 
 to all the rest of the story. 
 
 And so on this night Rol:)bie settled himself down in 
 his corner of the chair, and was very quiet. He asked 
 his sister no more questions. For the first time his eyes 
 began to droop before she had finished. 
 
 " I must try to make it more interesting," she said to 
 herself as she kissed him good-night. . . . 
 
 Years afterward, when our school-girl had grown
 
 36 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 older and wiser, she learned how abnormal, as well as 
 unsatisfying, had been her method, — that she ought to 
 have begun with what the child already knew something 
 about, and was interested in, and thence she could have 
 led him whither she would. To the high-school girl the 
 sidewalks were laid on the ground ; to the child, the 
 ground was hidden under the sidewalks. His first ex- 
 perience with earth was not the underlying ground, but 
 the overlying sidewalks. She had vainly thought to 
 begin at the beginning of God's works, instead of the 
 real beginning of knowledge-getting, — the " point of 
 contact " with the world as the child sees it 
 
 Now to go farther. Whatever interest is 
 common to Christianity and heathenism is 
 the point of sympathy at which the mission- 
 ary can most hopefully begin. This may be 
 at a point of contact with the religious life of 
 the heathen, an attitude, an act, a rite, a hope, 
 or something which has become already a 
 part of his religious experience. There will 
 be different starting-points for the Brahman, 
 the Mohammedan, the Confucian ; the edu- 
 cational genesis for the Bushman will be 
 different from that for the North American 
 Indian.
 
 THE PLANE OF EXPERIENCE. 37 
 
 A teacher at Hampton Institute, Miss 
 Annie Beecher Scoville, told me that as a 
 matter of fact the Indians can be more easily 
 reached through the story of the early He- 
 brews than can the negro. The Indian feels 
 a certain affiliation with Abraham which the 
 negro does not. The life experience of the 
 Indian is nomadic and closely akin to the 
 Orientals. The " point of departure " or 
 starting-point, in teaching the Indian, might 
 therefore differ from that in teaching the 
 negro, who touches life in experiences of 
 quite a different nature. 
 
 One of the most beautifully apt and con- 
 vincing illustrations of the necessity of ad- 
 dressing primitive minds from their own plane 
 of experience is found in a private letter re- 
 ceived from the Rev. W. Govan Robertson, 
 a missionary in British Central Africa. He 
 says : " I have sought in vain for a suitable 
 abstract of Bible history which might be trans- 
 lated. ' Peep of Day ' we have, and it an- 
 swers a certain purpose ' Line upon Line ' 
 has been tried, but neither appeals to the
 
 38 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 native mind. There is something far too 
 goody-goody in the phraseology to permit a 
 translation. ' My dear children,' ' Poor Dan- 
 iel,' ' How glad he must have been,' ' How 
 beautiful it must have been to see the angels,' 
 and so on, are not translatable. The scenes 
 of civilization are too often brought in, and 
 the illustrations fall flat. What is wanted is 
 something vigorous, not requiring much im- 
 agination to understand, based on wild native 
 life — very much like the life of the old Israel- 
 ites." 
 
 The principal difficulty encountered in 
 teaching these Africans is just the difficulty 
 which we encounter, expressed in reverse 
 terms. The Africans find no point of contact 
 with our civilization and modes of thought. 
 Our little children have few points of con- 
 tact with ancient Oriental life and modes of 
 thought. There is a suggestion of caution 
 here in the too easy satisfaction with which 
 the Twenty-third Psalm is given prominence 
 in the primary-school curriculum. But, of 
 this, more hereafter.
 
 THE PLANE OF EXPERIENCE. 39 
 
 It is even true of ourselves that these remote 
 Orientalisms confuse and perplex us. How 
 many can read through the Prophets with any 
 clear apprehension of the significance of allu- 
 sion, historical or poetical, made by those 
 writers ? Certainly a large majority of fairly 
 intelligent teachers on reading those books 
 gain only a general sense of something poetic, 
 something historical, something religious. 
 The unsatisfaction which such readers feel 
 under such circumstances is somewhat paral- 
 lel with the unsatisfied child's mind after a 
 " lesson " wherein the whole basis of thought 
 or action is abstract, or is external, remote 
 from, and foreign to, his life experiences. 
 But the child cannot help himself. Because 
 we make the presentation entertaining with 
 sentimental talk and ingenious illustrative 
 appliances, we imagine that he is realizing, or 
 re-living, the whole remote situation. 
 
 Mrs. Annie Trumbull Slosson's famous 
 *' Fishin' Jimmy " never got hold of Christ 
 until his plane of experience was struck, — 
 and that the fishing interest. Jimmy was
 
 40 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 practically insulated from salvation until that 
 one spot of contact was discovered, and 
 forthvv'ith the current flowed. But the Book 
 of Romans would not have availed, nor would 
 Genesis have proved a genesis for him. 
 
 And what about the fairy story ? Has the 
 child ever had actual experience in fairyland ? 
 No, in so far as there is no real fairyland — 
 and Yes, inasmuch as the essentials of fairy 
 life are just those of child life. Both are ca- 
 pricious, both ignore conditions of time, space, 
 and natural cause and effect ; both are spon- 
 taneous, lawless, incongruous, yet instinct 
 with dreams of unlimited power and auto- 
 cratic purpose. Between the child and the 
 fairy there is a very close resemblance and a 
 natural affiliation. They live usually on a 
 common plane. Materialistic reality com- 
 pels their separation at points only to find 
 them in search of one another again. 
 
 Any one who does not realize how widely 
 the adult and the childhood planes are sepa- 
 rated will do well to discover, after a ten min- 
 utes' conversation with a child, precisely how
 
 THE PLANE OF EXPERIENCE. 4I 
 
 far the child understood him, and how far he 
 understood the child. Let him take Long- 
 fellow or Bryant, for instance, and discover, 
 if he can, how little there is in these poets 
 within the range of the child's vision, and 
 how much on another plane altogether. Let 
 him go farther and put Eugene Field to the 
 test, and he will find a very small proportion 
 of his work really on the plane of child life. 
 Again, let any one take a child of from five 
 to eight into a legislative, or deliberative, as- 
 sembly for the first time, and attempt to ex- 
 plain the proceedings. Every time he puts 
 his foot down in order to take a step forward 
 in his explanation to the child, he will find 
 that he has stepped into a quicksand. The 
 very idea of representation in government, 
 of passing bills, making motions, and espe- 
 cially of controlling distant sections of country 
 by these processes, is something entirely out- 
 side of the child's life-plane. It is not merely 
 a question of the meaning of words, but it is 
 one of complex, unseen, and unsuspected re- 
 lations, one of motives affecting the social
 
 42 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 organism of which the child has little appre- 
 hension. It is one of generalizations, for the 
 construction of which the child is unfurnished 
 with basal particulars. 
 
 During the great railway strike in Philadel- 
 phia, I closely watched some little boys who, 
 having caught the destructive spirit of the 
 mob, came in and played their part in the 
 demonstration of vengeance against the rail- 
 way company. What understanding had 
 these juvenile offenders of what they appeared 
 to be doing ? The sociological and economic 
 question between the labor unions and the 
 railway corporation was doubtless entirely 
 foreign to the plane of their thought. But 
 the self-active impulse to change conditions 
 by destruction, was quite within their range. 
 
 It ought to be evident, then, that the same 
 set of facts or phenomena may be viewed on 
 entirely different planes. A child may seem 
 attentive, interested, and even zealous, and 
 yet be entirely blind to those facts and factors 
 which are absorbing the chief attention of his 
 elders.
 
 THE PLANE OF EXPERIENCE. 43 
 
 The guests of a summer hotel were one 
 evening entertained with recitations by an 
 expert of the platform. The children on the 
 front row exhibited varying degrees of inter- 
 est, rising at times to extreme demonstrations 
 of delight. Subsequently I found that the 
 poem which drew from them the loudest 
 plaudits was not only beyond their compre- 
 hension, but was entirely beyond their recall, 
 while that which excited and absorbed them 
 less was remembered. In the first case the 
 only thing on their plane was the dramatic 
 display of personal action, while the latter 
 touched them at a point of contact with their 
 own life interests. 
 
 Once more : A speaker having been in- 
 vited to make an address, and not supposing 
 children would be in the audience before him, 
 had designed to give to parents some advice 
 about the misjudging of their children. He 
 went prepared to give numerous incidents il- 
 lustrating the injustice of parental treatment. 
 But before him sat many little children ! It 
 would not do to have them hear him arraign
 
 44 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 their parents. He therefore moved on two 
 distinct planes of motive, — one for the chil- 
 dren, one for the adults. The former roared 
 with laughter at his characterizations of the 
 little folks in difficulty ; the latter were more 
 seriously drawing the inferences which came 
 to them, more or less, as self-accusations. 
 On interrogating certain of the children some 
 time after, it was evident that they had not 
 seen the real point of the address, for its im- 
 plic: tions had been out of their plane, while 
 the adults gave overt evidence of their appre- 
 ciation of the real motive of the speaker. 
 
 These illustrations ought to show clearly 
 that children of the primary class may have 
 Scripture lessons brought before them, the 
 tleatment of which entertains and makes 
 them seem to be taking in the whole historical 
 and spiritual situation, while, in fact, they 
 and the teacher are all the time viewing the 
 demonstration upon planes quite remote from 
 each other. 
 
 The child's plane of life is one of simples 
 and of concretes, one of directness and im-
 
 THE PLANE OF EXPERIENCE. 45 
 
 mediateness; one of activity, not of reflec- 
 tion; one of external appreciations, not of in- 
 trospections. Any attempt to force upon him 
 the complex, the abstract, the circuitous, the 
 remote, the introspective, vi^ill be sure to end 
 unhappily.
 
 Ill 
 
 APPLYING THE PRINCIPLE
 
 Ill 
 
 APPLYING THE PRINCIPLE 
 
 Although the general principle of appeal- 
 ing to the youthful mind through the already 
 familiar fact in interested experience has been 
 freely illustrated in the foregoing chapter, it 
 may be helpful to show more specifically just 
 how the principle can be applied in practice 
 with persons of all ages, and of various con- 
 ditions and interests. 
 
 It is not always possible, in dealing either 
 with an individual or with aggregations, to 
 strike the point of closest contact with life or 
 with the most familiar interests or activities, 
 but it is possible to address children on the 
 general plane of child sight. Notwithstand- 
 ing the stress that has, in the foregoing pages 
 been laid upon things or external objects of 
 sense perception, it is possible to find the 
 point of contact through, if not in, mere men 
 
 49
 
 50 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 tal habit or bodily function. Thus a child 
 may be reached through mirth, or hunger, or 
 through his curiosity or his spirit of investi- 
 gation. Yet this is not to say that the child's 
 thought must be turned back upon these men- 
 tal states or inward feelings as objects. We 
 can laugh with a laughing child and admire 
 with an admiring child, but, after all, back 
 of these emotional states lie the things of 
 sense which awaken them. But all this will 
 always have to be within the child-life plane. 
 In "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," the 
 line " How I wonder what you are," repre- 
 sents in the adult a very different mental at- 
 titude toward the twinkling star from what it 
 represents in the child. Speaking of nature 
 study Superintendent Balliet says children 
 " are not interested in the scientific distinc- 
 tions of root, stem, leaves, and flowers — 
 plants must be instinct with human attributes ; 
 they do not care about the structure of the 
 teeth, the claws, the eyes of the cat and the 
 dog, — the cat and the dog must appeal to 
 them as friends and companions ; they do not
 
 APPLYING THE PRINCIPLE. 5 1 
 
 care for the bear and the fox of natural his- 
 tory, it is the bear and the fox of the fairy 
 tale and the fable, endowed with human at- 
 tributes, that touch their emotions and arouse 
 their deepest interest." 
 
 Again, a "golden text," such as some of 
 those which have already been cited, would 
 not be likely to arouse the curiosity or tempt 
 the inquiring spirit, while a little bit of nature 
 or manufacture would at once incite inquiry 
 and hold attention. 
 
 Take an instance : I was once called, as a 
 substitute, to teach a class of very frisky boys 
 of perhaps nine to eleven years of age. The 
 lesson was on the Golden Rule. The boys 
 were in a state of ceaseless activity and mis- 
 chief-making. It was plain that they would 
 be utterly beyond my control if I persisted 
 either in mere Scripture readings or with 
 ethical abstractions. In less time than it 
 takes to tell it, I said to myself, " Get your 
 point of contact ; address them through their 
 senses; get on to the plane of boys' interests." 
 I immediately drew an ivory foot-rule out of
 
 52 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 my pocket and asked what it was. Silence 
 and attention were immediate. Some called 
 it a " ruler," some a " measure," and one 
 finally said it was a " rule." This experi- 
 ential knowledge of standards, curiosity, and 
 investigating spirit, at once became my allies. 
 I had a threefold point of contact. It is not 
 essential that every boy should be a carpenter's 
 son or draughtsman in a case like this. The 
 point of contact is in reality not so much with 
 a material object as with the sort of thing 
 — a standard of measurement, for instance 
 — that easilv occupies a boy's mind. If the 
 object is a thing of common personal experi- 
 ence with him, so much the better. 
 
 My next inquiry was to ascertain what it 
 was made of. Some said ivory, some said 
 bone. The class was in full control. It 
 was easy then to lead them on to an imagi- 
 nary rule, through keeping them in a certain 
 suspense of meaning, until we had reached 
 the Golden Rule. Questioning then drew 
 from them the relative value of ivory and 
 gold, and of rules made from them — real or
 
 APPLYING THE PRINCIPLE. 53 
 
 figurative. It is unnecessary to follow the 
 process more in detail, but the class was con- 
 quered, for that day at least, and their dis- 
 graceful hubbub was turned into an exem- 
 plary discussion of eternal truth. 
 
 Golden texts, theological doctrines, ethical 
 abstractions from Catechisms or the Epistles, 
 taken in themselves, would have been hurled 
 at these bright minds in vain ; but the con- 
 tact with a single tangible object such as a 
 boy would use, or, at all events, enjoys hand- 
 ling, was the successful point of departure for 
 his spiritual instruction. Observe also that 
 the lesson developed naturally from the mate- 
 rial to the moral rule. 
 
 Take another case : A visitor was called 
 on to address a school made up largely of 
 children more or less familiar with country 
 life, and of various ages. The lesson of the 
 day had been on the entry of the Israelites 
 into the promised land. He wanted to give 
 the school, in less than ten minutes, a general 
 grasp of the history of the Hebrews around 
 the full circuit from the promise to Abraham
 
 54 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING, 
 
 to the realization of the promise, centuries 
 later. The details of many Bible lessons 
 necessarily must have obstructed the broader 
 view or general trend of the history. He 
 must proceed upon the plan of a circuit or 
 circularity. From what point in ordinary life 
 could they be led into the conception of cir- 
 cularity, and the circuit from Canaan through 
 Egypt and the Wilderness back into Canaan ? 
 The first interest was awakened by draw- 
 ing out, through questioning, their knowledge 
 of the oak and the acorn, and, again, by the 
 complete circuit made by a drop of water 
 from ocean to cloud, to rain, to spring, to 
 river, and to sea again. From contact with 
 this object illustration of the idea of circu- 
 larity it was easy to lead the school on to the 
 circuit that covered centuries in the life of 
 the Hebrews. This was successfully accom- 
 plished in eight minutes. But it must be 
 noted that the lesson here does not develop 
 as naturally out of the starting-point as in the 
 preceding case. The point of contact was 
 more in the nature of a catch at attention by
 
 APPLYING THE PRINCIPLE. 55 
 
 artifice and was, therefore, in a measure, 
 faulty. Pedagogically this is of much less 
 value than a point of contact from which the 
 essential teaching is not a parallelism, but an 
 organic, unfolding unity. But this was not 
 a grade class and one may resort to such arti- 
 ficial processes — mere parallels or illustra- 
 tions — with heterogeneous assemblages, even 
 though it cannot be regarded as a very prom- 
 ising pedagogical process. 
 
 Another illustration I extract from a re- 
 markably graphic and suggestive article by 
 Elizabeth Harrison in The Sunday-School 
 Times. It shows also that the application of 
 the principle is not limited to little children. 
 
 A kindergartner, visiting a mission school, 
 was asked by the superintendent to take a 
 class of " toughs " which had already been 
 given up in despair by four teachers. The 
 threat of the superintendent to eject them 
 from the room if they did not behave was 
 received with derisive laughter. This was 
 followed, during the opening exercises, by 
 various outrageous antics, and then came the
 
 ^6 POINi- OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 time for the lesson teaching. Miss Harrison 
 continues : 
 
 As soon as they were settled, one boy raised his black- 
 ing-box, which up to this time had been hidden under 
 his chair ; with a flourish almost too quick to be seen, 
 he scraped it across the nose of another boy. This was 
 an affront not to be tolerated. Instantly, the insulted 
 boy raised his clenched fist. In a moment more the 
 blow would have descended, and the usual street row 
 would have taken place in the Sunday-school room. 
 
 This was our kindergartner's opportunity. " From 
 the Known to the Unknown " had been her motto for 
 years. Through curiosity, reverence was to be awak- 
 ened. Quick as a flash, she reached out her hand, and 
 seizing the blacking-box exclaimed, in a tone of anima- 
 tion : " I can tell you something about this box that you 
 do not know." 
 
 The boys were amazed, as they expected a repri- 
 mand. The clenched fists slowly descended ; all eyes 
 were fastened upon her. 
 
 " Bah ! " said one of the boys, in a tone of contempt; 
 " you're trying to guy us now." 
 
 " Indeed, I am not," replied the kindergartner. " I 
 know something very wonderful about this box, and I 
 do not believe any of you ever heard it." 
 
 "Give us a rest!" tauntingly said another skeptic. 
 But all the others cried out : " What it is ? Go ahead ! " 
 
 " Of what is this box made ? " said the teacher, in a 
 slow and mysterious tone of voice.
 
 APPLYING THE PRINCIPLE. 57 
 
 •«Wood, of course," said two or three of the disap- 
 pointed group, the look of contempt returning to their 
 faces. 
 
 "Oh, yes! of course," responded the teacher; "but 
 where did the wood come from ? " 
 
 " Out of the carpenter-shop," again answered two or 
 three. 
 
 " But where did the carpenter get it ? " said the kin- 
 dergartner, still keeping up her tone of mystery. 
 
 " From the lumber-yard," answered one boy, more 
 knowing than the rest. 
 
 " Yes," said the teacher, encouragingly ; " but where 
 did the lumber-yard man get it ? " 
 
 This brought the wisest among them to the end of 
 his knowledge. 
 
 She then began, and described to them the long, slow 
 growth, through centuries of time, of the forest trees. 
 The long, long years of silent waiting, until the ax of the 
 woodman did his work ; the busy, picturesque life of the 
 logging-camp ; the dangerous voyage of the logs, tied 
 together in a raft, as they floated down the majestic 
 river ; the wonderful invention by which machinery was 
 made to transform these round logs into flat boards ready 
 for the lumber-yard. 
 
 The boys listened in intense interest. When she had 
 finished, there was a deep-drawn sigh, and all eyes 
 turned instinctively to the blacking-box, the mystery of 
 whose former life had been unfolded to thei»^ 
 
 The teacher saw that she had gained a point. Rever- 
 ence must come from idle curiosity. Curiosity had been
 
 58 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 gradually transformed into interest already. She con- 
 tinued : 
 
 " I think I know something else about this box which 
 you do not know." 
 
 She then drew out their knowledge about 
 the nails that held it together, tracing the 
 process of their manufacture back to the soli- 
 tary bits of iron ore in the mountain range, so 
 old that the life of man had no recoi-d of their 
 beginning. She graphically pictured the life 
 of a miner. By this time every boy was 
 leaning forward in breathless interest, fasci- 
 nated by the new world into which she had 
 led him. Again taking up the box, she asked 
 what color it was, and pursued the same 
 method on that point. 
 
 Gradually the ringleader among the boys, leaning 
 forward until his head reached far beyond his body, ex- 
 claimed in tones of deepest reverence : 
 
 '• I know what you are. You're a fortune-teller ; 
 that's what you are! " 
 
 This was the highest tribute which he could pay 
 her. In the back alley in which he lived, a mysterious 
 fortune-teller played the part of Delphic oracle. To him 
 she was the personification of wisdom. And there sat a
 
 APPLYING THE PRINCIPLE. 59 
 
 woman before him who apparently knew everything, — 
 who could tell him of that great mysterious world which 
 lay outside of his district. 
 
 She had gained her point. She had raised within 
 each of them a feeling of reverence. . . . Slowly but 
 surely she built up an altar in them to the unknown 
 God, which altar was necessary before the God of right- 
 eousness and of mercy and of love could be preached 
 unto them. 
 
 To come back more particularly to little 
 children, the principle of the point of contact 
 and the way of leading the child easily from 
 this point in his experience to spiritual truth 
 without leaving the natural level of a child's 
 sight cannot be better illustrated than from 
 Froebel's " Mother Play." ^ 
 
 ' The reader is referred particularly to Susan E. Blow's 
 translation of " The Mottoes and Commentaries of 
 Friedrich Froebel's Mother Play," one of the volumes of 
 Appleton's International Education Series. " The 
 Alutter- und Kose- lieder" says H. Courthope Bowen, 
 "were collected and composed and organized some fifty 
 years ago for little German children — mainly those who 
 were surrounded with country sights and sounds and oc- 
 cupations. A very small amount of consideration will 
 show, that for little English or American children —
 
 60 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 especially when they live in cities — something different 
 will be required if a similar effect is to be produced. 
 We shall require what is English, or American, or what 
 has become such. For the rest, we must draw upon the 
 children's homes, and upon the actual life by which they 
 are surrounded." 
 
 From so simple a point in the child's 
 activities as the pat-a-cake play Froebel 
 carries the little learner along step by step 
 thus : " The bread, or, better still, the little 
 cake which the child likes so much, he re- 
 ceives from his mother ; the mother, in turn, 
 receives it from the baker. So far so good. 
 We have found two links in the great chain 
 of life and service. Let us beware, however, 
 of making the child feel that these links com- 
 plete the chain. The baker can bake no 
 cake if the miller grinds no meal ; the miller 
 can grind no meal if the farmer brings him 
 no grain ; the farmer can bring no grain if 
 his field yields no crop ; the held can yield 
 no crop if the forces of nature fail to work 
 together to produce it ; the forces of nature 
 could not conspire together were it not for
 
 APPLYING THE PRINCIPLE. 6 1 
 
 the all-wise and beneficent Power who in- 
 cites and guides them to their predetermined 
 ends." 
 
 Observe how different is this process from 
 the common one of forcing the child on to 
 an adult plane through the abstractions of 
 theology, or systems of adult thought. 
 
 Again, note the suggestion in the play of 
 " The Two Gates : " " The idea suggested 
 in the farmyard gate is that the child should 
 be taught to prize and protect what he has 
 acquired. The thought illustrated in the gar- 
 den gate is that he should be led to recognize 
 and name the different objects in his environ- 
 ment. In your attempt to carry out the lat- 
 ter idea, be careful to begin with the things 
 which the child sees around him in the house, 
 the yard, the garden, and the meadow. From 
 these advance to the naming of objects in the 
 pasture and the wood. Teach your child not 
 only to recognize and name objects, but also 
 to recognize and name qualities." 
 
 H. Courthope Bowen notes that " actual 
 life and actual nature around them — or which
 
 62 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 can be placed close to them, are the Froebelian 
 means of education. Because the Charcoal- 
 Burner is more picturesque, more romantic, 
 than The Cabman^ that does not make him 
 more, it makes him less effective for our pur- 
 pose. It is with cabmen, not charcoal-burn- 
 ers, that so many little city children have to 
 do. What Froebel bids us is to make the life 
 and doings of the cabman interesting — yes, 
 and even beautiful in their way — for the lit- 
 tle ones who come in contact with them ; 
 and so of all the physical world that comes 
 within touch of the children ; till the very 
 stones of the dingy pavement become won- 
 derful, full of suggestion, part of the golden 
 chain that links the world to God." Bowen 
 elsewhere notes that " for those little city 
 children we should not tell of The Fish in 
 the Brook but of The Sparroiu in the Street ; 
 not of The Nest with its birdlings, but of The 
 Cat and her Kittens ; not of The Charcoal- 
 Burner^ but of The Costermonger^ The Cabman^ 
 The Newspaper Boy^ The Watercress IFo/nan ; 
 not of The Wolf and the Boar^ but of The
 
 APPLYING THE PRINCIPLE. 63 
 
 Dog; and even instead of playing at "mow- 
 ing the grass " it would be better for those 
 little children to play at " sweeping the room." 
 
 The weather-vane is another familiar ob- 
 ject in the child's life. P^oebel here admi- 
 rably illustrates the difference between con- 
 ducting the child always on the plane of his 
 own natural powers or appreciations, and con- 
 fusing him by thrusting him out of it. " I 
 might as well talk to you in a foreign tongue 
 as to tell you that ' the pressure of air, or its 
 altered density, or a change in its tempera- 
 ture, causes wind ' ! You would not under- 
 stand a single word of this explanation. But 
 one thing you can understand even now: A 
 single mighty power like the wind can do 
 many things great and small. You see the 
 things it does, though you cannot see the 
 wind itself. There are many things, my 
 child, which we can be sure of though we 
 cannot see them." 
 
 Enough has been said to demonstrate the 
 very important double principle of beginning 
 at the point of contact with experience and
 
 64 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 of reaching high spiritual truths by keeping 
 always upon the child's plane or level of life. 
 
 In aiming for new truth, and especially 
 spiritual truth, however, we must allow the 
 child, or man, to make the final reach through 
 his own self-activity. He never can know 
 anything unless he has himself worked it into 
 his own life. One great fault of our primary 
 religious instruction is that it is too clogged 
 with process, or method. Our Lord usually 
 left it to the people to work out his sudden 
 transitions from the physical to the spiritual 
 — from water to the water of life, from bodily 
 to spiritual healing, etc. Sometimes his tran- 
 sition truth lay in a double meaning, as in 
 " the wind bloweth [spirit breatheth] where 
 it listeth." This is quite too occult for a 
 child, but it illustrates our Lord's knowledge 
 of the necessity of allowing the pupil's mind 
 to perform its part in gaining that knowledge 
 which is power. Our moral tags, or appli- 
 cations, are the ruin of many of our Bible 
 and other stories for children. 
 
 The Salvation Army seeks and finds the de-
 
 APPLYING THE PRINCIPLE. 65 
 
 graded wretches of the slums, and others, not 
 through a map of Palestine, nor through the 
 Catechism, but through that which is com- 
 mon to their experience, — noise and racket, 
 the bass drum and the brass horn. The loud 
 music and the bright colors are the " lines of 
 least resistance " over which this species of 
 human nature passes into the first contempla- 
 tion of a cleaner, better, and nobler life. 
 Similarly, a child is to be introduced to his 
 studies at the point of experience, — to ge- 
 ography by starting at his sense perceptions 
 of distance, direction, form, number, rain, 
 snow, clouds, steam, vapor, heat, cold, etc. ; 
 then locations at home and vicinity, the yard, 
 garden, farm, or landscape in view, etc. 
 
 A live teacher in the South wrote to me, 
 " My mother most interestingly taught me 
 botany from the ' point of contact ' of the 
 yellow pollen on my nose when I had smelled 
 a fragrant flower too ardently." 
 
 In response to the author's first publication 
 on this subject of the point of contact, a 
 teacher in the Southwest, iMr. James Newton
 
 66 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 Baslcett, wrote : " You are eminently right 
 about your Sunday-school methods. It is 
 God's way. Jesus went to the people at 
 their point of contact, and, though a carpen- 
 ter, he never drew a figure from his own call- 
 ing, but always from theirs." He then goes 
 on to give his experience in feeling for a 
 point of contact from which to start an inter- 
 est in ornithology in a country boy. He 
 says : 
 
 " Recently I attempted to describe the 
 oven-bird to a country boy who, I knew, had 
 often seen it, but did not know it. I went 
 through plumage, size, song, nest, etc., but 
 the case looked hopeless. At last I men- 
 tioned the habit of alighting near the limb 
 and running out toward its tip. His face 
 brightened. ' Is he a kind of high stepper? ' 
 he asked, picking up his feet exactly as the 
 bird does. In this way the boy has become 
 a helpful observer — learning how to observe. 
 His descriptions are so accurate that I often 
 diagnose birds from them before he is through. 
 He has a new interest in his farm work. He
 
 APPLYING THE PRINCIPLE. 67 
 
 could never have got it from systematic orni- 
 thology." No more can the child get his in- 
 terest in religious truth through systematic 
 theology, catechisms, or other adult forms of 
 conventionalized and abstract thought, or 
 images based on material things with which 
 the child has never come into sense contact. 
 Knowledge is power. Power and knowledge 
 alike are the sign of life. Only from life can 
 life come. Out of the concrete experience 
 the child abstracts a general truth or principle, 
 and then out of this abstraction of his own 
 making comes again his concrete, outward 
 deed. 
 
 A little girl once asked me about the bones 
 ill her arm. I briefly explained, but the off- 
 hand explanation was not likely to remain 
 with her. Soon after came a day when I 
 carved a chicken for dinner. Giving her a 
 wing, I said, " You see this part has one 
 bone and this part two. It is like our arms." 
 I subsequently showed her a human skeleton. 
 The next time she was given a chicken wing 
 i;t dinner, I said, " You know there are two
 
 68 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 bones here, as in our forearms. Chickens' 
 wings take the place of our arms." " Or," 
 she responded, "wouldn't the chickens say, 
 if they could talk about us, ' Their arms take 
 the place of our wings ' ? " 
 
 Suppose I had answered, " Ah, my child, 
 we must begin at the beginning ! Anatomy 
 is 'that branch of morphology which treats 
 of the structure of organisms.' There are 
 various divisions of the subject, as compara- 
 tive anatomy, pathological anatomy, prac- 
 tical, surgical, topographical, transcendental 
 anatomies, etc. Let us take nature in an 
 orderly way. You must first commit to 
 memory the definition of anatomy and the 
 technology of the bones themselves. In 
 after years it will serve you when you come 
 to study the arm of man and the wing of 
 bird." 
 
 Is this a travesty ? Call it rather a parallel. 
 Has it not been practically the procedure in 
 many Sunday and day schools ? No, our 
 starting-point is not a logical definition or 
 historical beginning, but a point in the pupil's
 
 APPLYING THE PRINCIPLE. 6g 
 
 experience. In commenting on the course 
 in physical geography in Pestalozzi's school 
 Froebel says, " Particularly unpleasant to me 
 was the commencement of the course which 
 began with an account of the bottom of the 
 sea, although the pupils could have no con- 
 ception of their own as to its nature or di- 
 mensions." 
 
 As has been intimated, this principle is not 
 peculiar to childhood but is, in a degree, uni- 
 versal. The previous chapter quotes Mr. 
 Robertson's observation on the necessity of 
 reaching the wild African on the plane of 
 his experience. How would our principle 
 be applied in Central Africa? In response 
 to my request Mr. Robertson wrote an article 
 for The Sunday School Times on " The Use 
 of Native Tradition and Superstition in 
 Bible Teaching among Africans." He says : 
 
 " How best to bring the Bible teachings to bear upon 
 the understanding and conscience of the uncivilized and 
 uneducated native, is a question with which one is con- 
 stantly confronted in his work in Central Africa. With 
 him there is none of the • hereditary knowledge ' of the
 
 70 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 Bible, which is so useful in dealing with even the most 
 degraded in Christian lands. Neither is there Christian 
 sentiment nor example to help him. 
 
 " The theme of the Bible is so far out of the ordinary 
 course of his thoughts, and its language, even in our 
 best translations, so foreign to his ear, that it is with dif- 
 ficulty his interest can be aroused. Add to these the 
 difficulty of teaching him by analogy, and his inability 
 to generalize or analyze his conclusions, and one has 
 some idea of what a missionary has to overcome in 
 simply placing the gospel message before his congrega- 
 tion. 
 
 " With a good knowledge of the language, and the 
 confidence of the people, the observant may find a story 
 of native tradition and superstitious ceremony firmly im- 
 planted in the native mind, of which he can make use, 
 as did Paul at Athens (Acts xvii. 22, 23), to illustrate 
 and enforce his message. 
 
 " Reference to such a native story at once secures the 
 attention, and constitutes a common ground of sympathy 
 between speaker and audience. And it w a common 
 ground, for God created all men ' in his own image,' 
 and left upon the consciences of all some ' witness ' of 
 himself." 
 
 The native African may thus be touched 
 at a point in his experience — his thought, 
 feeling, and devotional attitude, which is an 
 experience in common with him and his
 
 APPLYING THE PRINCIPLE. 7 1 
 
 Christian teacher. This is his spiritual gate 
 of entry to the Kingdom of Christ. No one 
 illustrated this principle of the point of con- 
 tact in experience better than Paul when he 
 began his sermon with the unknown God as 
 his text. 
 
 The Rev. Mr. Poole, agent of the Chris- 
 tian League, among the Chinese in Phila- 
 delphia, says that these Chinamen are reached 
 through their desire to learn to read. He 
 remarks that if he should begin by telling 
 them not to worship idols, they would turn 
 away. Idols are indeed on the plane of their 
 interests, but a point of contact must be 
 handled by the teacher sympathetically, and 
 not aggressively or inimically. "Every 
 Chinaman that has been reached in China- 
 town," says Mr. Poole, " has been reached 
 through the spelling-book. By the time 
 they get confidence in us they reach a point 
 in the primer that says ' God loves all,' ' God 
 loves me,' etc." 
 
 It is said that when the new queen of 
 Madagascar saw that the missionaries were
 
 7i POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 making headway with the people she ordered 
 them out of her kingdom. They remon- 
 strated by saying that they were only teach- 
 ing Greek and Hebrew with some other 
 branches of knowledge. The queen, relent- 
 ing, said she wanted her people taught some- 
 thing useful. If they could teach them to 
 make soap there would be some excuse for 
 their presence. The missionaries sent the 
 queen a bar of soap and gained her favor. 
 Soap was the material point of contact — the 
 centre of native interest from which Chris- 
 tianity was to be developed. Here is a new 
 application of the proverb " Cleanliness is 
 next to godliness " ! 
 
 A writer in Congregational Work says : 
 
 " Recently a colporteur in Korea gathered some people 
 about him, but before he could tell them anything about 
 the good books which he carried, and which he wished 
 them to buy and read, they had to feel of him and handle 
 his hat and his clothes. In some places a missionary 
 has been asked to take off his shoes and stockings, that 
 the people may see whether he really has feet and toes 
 like themselves. Once a missionary in China, after he 
 had preached to a company which seemed to be listen-
 
 APPLYING THE PRINCIPLE. 73 
 
 ing intently, asked if any of those present would like to 
 make any inquiries that they might know more about 
 what he had been saying, to which one of the company 
 said immediately, ' We would like to know what those 
 two buttons on the back of your coat are for.' " 
 
 No point of contact with superstitious, 
 ignorant, and especially Oriental people is 
 more effective than that on the plane of heal- 
 ing; hence the advantage of the medical mis- 
 sionary. Dr. W, J. Wanless, of the Ameri- 
 can Presbyterian Mission in India, writing in 
 The Sunday School Times, says : 
 
 "The medical missionary as a follower of Christ has 
 an immense advantage in his ability to disarm preju- 
 dice, and prepare the way for the preaching and recep- 
 tion of the gospel message. Christ's healing miracles 
 attracted the multitudes, and, because of them ' the com- 
 mon people heard him gladly.' The same attention is 
 gained by medical missionaries in every mission land 
 to-day. Thousands flock for bodily treatment, and they 
 hear of Him who alone heals the soul. In no station 
 of our western India mission has it been so easy to ob- 
 tain property and secure the good-will of the people and 
 state, and enjoy the opportunity of preaching to all 
 classes, as in Miraj, the centre of the mission's medical 
 work. 
 
 " More than three hundred different villages are annu-
 
 74 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 ally represented in the patients of all castes who seek 
 relief in the Miraj dispensary and hospital. And all 
 willingly hear the gospel, — hundreds for the first time, 
 and thousands repeatedly. In the hospital for weeks 
 together many listen to the daily explanation of the 
 Scriptures. Numbers of these people come hundreds of 
 miles for treatment. The majority come from villages 
 beyond a fifteen-mile radius of Miraj. During their 
 residence in the hospital, or while attending the dispen- 
 sary, the patients often learn more by what they see than 
 by what they are verbally taught. The teaching is ' illus- 
 trated.' Gospel deeds, the fruit of gospel commands, 
 are acted in their presence. These things, so foreign to 
 their own religious systems, are matters of amazement to 
 them. . . . 
 
 " In view of the foregoing, it is not surprising that, in 
 their ignorance, they regard us with worshipful rever- 
 ence. It is, indeed, a matter of almost daily occurrence, 
 that we have to check them in the very act of worship- 
 ing us. Entering the hospital, one hears from a new 
 comer, ' Here comes our god,' ' He is the great God,' 
 ' Where is there a god like him ? ' ' Sahib, you are our 
 god,' etc. The other day, on entering the ward, a 
 patient whose leg we had amputated called me to his 
 bedside, and said, ' Sahib, put your feet on my bed.' 
 ' And for what ? ' I asked, surprised. ' I want to wor- 
 ship them,' he replied. Such occasions always furnish 
 us with a text on which to speak against idolatry, the 
 sin so common to them, — the sin of giving God's glory 
 to man."
 
 APPLYING THE PRINCIPLE. 75 
 
 The real point of contact is here indicated 
 to be in the idea of a common humanity. 
 These natives could hardly understand how 
 anything so different could really be one of 
 their kind with only a little surface variation. 
 This was their interest — an experience in 
 their narrow lives. And what better starting- 
 point for teaching Christianity than human 
 brotherhood ? 
 
 Dr. George Matheson, in his " Studies of 
 the Portrait of Christ," emphasizing the fact 
 that it is because men are so much alike that 
 they notice their differences, speaks suggestive 
 hints for us at this point. There is a com- 
 mon plane, for instance, on which the disciples 
 of Confucius and of Jesus can meet and un- 
 derstand each other. Confucius, like Jesus, 
 values commonplace duties and the power to 
 do little things. But the reason why he values 
 them is not the reason why Jesus values them. 
 Confucius wants men to be worldly and to 
 show the proof of earthly intelligence ; Jesus 
 wants them to be unworldly and to show the 
 proof of heavenly intelligence.
 
 76 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 Again, there are likenesses between Buddha 
 and Christ. Both demand an emptying of 
 self; both select poverty, privation, and toil. 
 From this common plane of likeness, or point 
 of contact, between the followers of Jesus 
 and of Buddha, the Buddhist is to be led to 
 the essential difference between the two classes 
 of disciples. The cross to Buddha means 
 submission to human misery ; to Jesus it is a 
 protest against such misery. Buddha wants 
 men to bow the knee to their own nothingness ; 
 Jesus wants them to lift the burdens that hu- 
 miliate mankind. Jesus would not teach 
 submission to pain, but resistance to it. 
 
 Once more, Zoroaster is at one with Jesus 
 in calling on men to recognize the struggle 
 with evil ; the earth is a battlefield between 
 powers of earth and those of heaven. From 
 this common plane, or point of contact, the 
 Zoroastrian is to be led away from Zoroaster's 
 call to put on the warlike spirit to Jesus' call 
 to put on the spirit of peace. The power 
 that overcomes the world with Jesus is peace 
 and mental calm.
 
 APPLYING THE PRINCIPLE. 77 
 
 Finally, Dr. Matheson cites the Stoics. 
 There is much in common here with the 
 teachings of Jesus also. Epictetus stands 
 upon the sea because he has conquered his 
 passions ; Jesus stands upon the sea by reason 
 of a great passion of love — what we call the 
 Lord's passion. Epictetus has reached forti- 
 tude by restraining the vital stream ; Jesus 
 has reached fortitude by enlarging the vital 
 stream. Epictetus has won by suppressing 
 emotion ; Jesus has won by the emotion of a 
 wider interest. . . . The one has crucified 
 the sense of danger; the other has eclipsed 
 it by the sense of a greater danger. The 
 one has conquered by the contraction, the 
 other by the expansion, of the heart." 
 
 These are suggestive illustrations of the 
 way in which the modern missionary is to 
 apply the principle of the point of contact at 
 the plane of experience and of leading there- 
 from to the hitherto unknown Christian truth. 
 There is always a possibility of establishing 
 contact at the point of likeness, sympathy, 
 and common interest, between men and men
 
 78 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 in all parts of the globe, and we have thus 
 seen how the principle works in the case of 
 African, North American Indian, Confucian, 
 Zoroastrian, Buddhist, etc. 
 
 The applications of the principle may be 
 extended in other directions. For instance, 
 how can it be applied in music teaching ? 
 Here is a real case : A music teacher having 
 a young boy for a pupil was much discouraged 
 by his indifference and utter lack of interest 
 in his task. On questioning him she found 
 that he regarded piano playing as something 
 for girls and not for boys to do. Having the 
 natural teaching instinct she saw that the boy, 
 who was thus suffering from the delusion that 
 he was engaged in an effeminate business, 
 must be reached through his interests as a boy 
 — through boy life. So she tactfully played 
 the few notes of an army bugle-call on the 
 piano, and asked him whether he knew what 
 that was. She explained its meaning as mili- 
 tary language and immediately had a hold on 
 him. Nor did she stop there, for she bought 
 a book of bugle-calls and used them as excr-
 
 APPLYING THE PRINCIPLE. 79 
 
 cises. The boy became intensely interested 
 as each call brought up a mental picture of 
 army life. Music and the piano were no 
 longer a feminine pastime. The boy was 
 won through his masculine interests. 
 
 Many a parent is puzzled to know how to 
 interest the children in good reading. An 
 article on this subject by Antoinette Bryant 
 Hervey, in The Chautauquan (January, 1900), 
 contains some excellent illustrations of our 
 principle. She says : 
 
 " To develop a love of good reading, we must not only 
 set an example, and begin early, but we must enter so 
 sympathetically into youthful tastes and standards that 
 we can start from the child's actual interest rather than 
 from what we think he ought to be interested in. Some 
 little boys in a New York school, at the age when the 
 collecting instinct is strong, formed a unique club for 
 collecting the dirty stubs of streetcar tickets which the 
 conductors throw on the ground. One boy's mother for- 
 bade it at once, with the result that he collected on the 
 sly, and hid the stubs in the basement. Another mother, 
 equally disgusted with the dirty stubs which filled her 
 son's desk, and with the way he went along the street 
 with eyes for nothing but stubs, took an entirely differ- 
 ent course. She started from stubs, a worthless interest,
 
 80 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 and led him off into stamps, a useful interest. First, by 
 suggesting that transfers were much more interesting 
 than stubs, she led him to study the transfers and their 
 meaning, till he could tell every cross-town line from 
 125th Street to the Battery, and became absorbingly in- 
 terested in the geography of New York. Upon the 
 transfer interest it was easy to graft the postage-stamp 
 interest, from which in turn sprang a whole bunch of 
 interests, geographical, historical, ethnological. 
 
 " Another problem in interest grafting is presented by 
 the mother of a boy of twelve, who, she says, ' cares for 
 nothing but horses. He will not read, or listen to read- 
 ing.' According to the principle of ' grafting,' the 
 solution is simply to begin with some book about horses. 
 Even so badly written a story as ' Black Beauty ' may 
 serve as a stepping-stone. Then perhaps Kiplmg's story 
 — ' The Maltese Cat ' — of the horses who really played 
 the polo game, and that other horse story in • The Day's 
 Work,' 'A Walking Delegate.' Then «The Bell of 
 Atri,' by Longfellow, and the story of Pegasus, in Haw- 
 thorne's ' Wonder Book.' By that time, and even much 
 earlier, the boy will easily be led to books of exploration, 
 and books about strange people, and then, before you 
 know it, your boy is interested in history." 
 
 Thus far we have considered more par- 
 ticularly the individual interest, but the prin- 
 ciple can be and often is applied to the public 
 mind. When Froebel was in need of funds
 
 APPLYING THE PRINCIPLE. 1 
 
 to establish his institution at Blankenburg in 
 1840, he took advantage of the four-hun- 
 dredth anniversary of printing to advertise 
 and secure attention to his scheme. In his 
 reminiscences, Dr. H. Clay Trumbull relates 
 how Thomas K. Beecher, being asked to 
 speak, in Hartford, on the Devil, made his 
 point of contact with the public mind 
 through the popular excitement over spirit- 
 ualism which was then centred at Hartford. 
 Similarly, times of thanksgiving, of calamity, 
 of national emotion of any kind, furnish 
 states or planes of experience through which 
 the public is often to be most successfully 
 appealed to in any appropriate interest or 
 cause.
 
 IV 
 
 MISSING THE POINT
 
 IV 
 
 MISSING THE POINT 
 
 There are those who have a certain 
 intuitive sense that the point of interest to a 
 child and the point of departure, or starting, 
 in his instruction, should be something 
 which to them seems childish and simple. 
 Consequently they often succeed in gaining 
 entry to the child mind. But, having 
 no formulated guiding principle, they also 
 often fail. 
 
 To illustrate : I remember once hearing 
 an address to children based upon the text, 
 " The little foxes that spoil the vines." 
 These little foxes were our small vices or 
 weaknesses. Why did the speaker choose 
 such a point of departure ? I suppose " the 
 little foxes " had a simple, childlike sound 
 about it to him, and seemed as though it 
 would be easily a point of interest to little 
 
 85
 
 86 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 children. Perhaps it was, in so far as it 
 roused their curiosity. Whatever the chil- 
 dren got out of the address, they got in spite 
 of, rather than because of, the point of 
 departure, which was not a point of contact 
 with common experience. To very few 
 children docs a fox exist in more than name, 
 if that ; and the propensity of foxes for spoil- 
 ing vines is one which they could not appre- 
 ciate unless they had lived in a country where 
 they had actually seen this kind of destruction 
 wrought, or heard it talked about until it 
 became a familiar fact. 
 
 In the same way, writers for children often 
 seem to suppose that they are placing them- 
 selves on the child's plane by the use of certain 
 kinds of youthful expressions and by a kind 
 of forced intimacy of manner, while the sit- 
 uations, the motives and raw material out of 
 which the story or article is made, are foreign 
 to the child's perception, thought, or feeling. 
 
 Certain " appliances " frequently used in 
 the primary school as a part of the process 
 of " adapting " the lesson matter sometimes
 
 MISSING THE POINT. 
 
 fail because, forming no links with the 
 child's own experience, they merely centre 
 the interest on themselves as objects. 
 
 Miss Julia E. Peck well says : " In our 
 attempts to meet the child on his own 
 level we have fallen very far below his 
 level, failing to note from week to week 
 that the dignity of his simplicity is a lasting 
 rebuke to our fussy sentimentality." 
 
 Again, history as such is a concept practi- 
 cally out of the primary child's power of 
 acquirement. He has too few years behind 
 him in his own experience, and has had too 
 little dealing with that impersonal thing — 
 organized society. History as personal 
 biography, Bible stories as such, have a 
 very large educational function for the little 
 child, but not as history. No matter what 
 delight the children show in paraphernalia, no 
 matter what pat answers they give, we must 
 be suspicious of the delight and the answers, 
 and we must look for another cause than 
 historical consciousness. 
 
 An illustration is to be found in the follow-
 
 88 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 ing, which was sent to me by an experienced 
 secular as well as Sunday-school teacher. 
 She says : " I shall not soon forget my own 
 struggles with the International lessons. I had 
 small boys from six to eight years old. The 
 lesson was Nehemiah's prayer. I had tried 
 very hard to make the lesson practical, and 
 entertaining as well, but I am afraid I must 
 have succeeded too well, for when I asked 
 one small boy how many years ago he thought 
 all these things had happened, he opened his 
 eyes very wide, and ventured, * I guess about 
 a week.' I think he thought that he had been 
 rash in suggesting such a remote period." 
 We remember certain events of our child- 
 hood only as incidents in that life. They 
 seldom have any historicity about them. 
 Their chronological order we are seldom 
 conscious of unless we have worked it out in 
 later life by reasoning upon it. 
 
 A young lady tells me that she remembers 
 the terrible attacks of earache she used to 
 suffer from when a child. But her mother 
 says she never had more than one attack !
 
 MISSING THE POINT. 89 
 
 A writer in the London Academy thus 
 shows how completely " Gray's Elegy " is re- 
 mote from the schoolboy's plane of experi- 
 ence. He says : 
 
 " To carry boys over the Pons Asinorum is child's play 
 compared with making them understand the • Elegy.' I 
 remember how I used to grind through it without one 
 word of explanation when I was a little fellow of ten 
 years of age [observe, ten ! ] : each line went by itself, 
 and one conseciuence was that the tiling in the piece that 
 impressed me most was the reference to 
 
 The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear. 
 
 I had had my neck nearly wrung off in those days for 
 once saying that a noun • governed ' something, and I 
 was not the boy to risk further twisting by asking if it 
 was the polar bear that was meant ; but there was a 
 magnificent remoteness in the dwelling of this creature 
 that always pleased me, and it was not till later that I 
 discovered what the verse really meant. 
 
 " Yet the real case against the ' Elegy ' has still to be 
 stated. It is not the presence of isolated, difficult lines 
 which makes Gray's poem the most unsuitable in the 
 language to put before boys. It is the whole mind of 
 the ' Elegy,' which is a concentrated account of a mood 
 impossible to the young. The poem touches a boy no- 
 where. It gives him no cue ; there is no beckoning 
 familiar thing to hearten and invite. . . . What root
 
 90 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 has it in boyhood ? What boy ever believed in the 
 ' hoary-headed swain ' or the ' forefathers of the ham- 
 let ' ? As for the youth who gave to Misery all he had, 
 a tear, and gained from Heaven, 'twas all he wish'd, a 
 fiicnd, no schoolboy ever understood that transaction." 
 
 The effort to force a child on to a plane 
 not his own is thus condemned in an editorial 
 utterance of The School Journal. 
 
 " The mistake is frequently made of assigning subjects 
 for compositions that lie outside of the pupil's range of 
 experience and vision. A premium is thereby put upon 
 shallowness in thought and superficiality of judgment. 
 It is a way of making the children hypocrites by having 
 them talk or write of things they know nothing about. 
 Every great educator from Comenius down to our day 
 has raised his voice against what Basedow terms • per- 
 nicious word culture.' " 
 
 Girls just in their teens are sometimes re- 
 quired to write compositions on society or 
 other topics upon which school children should 
 have no opportunity of forming an opinion. 
 The Baroness Buelow quotes Froebel as say- 
 ing, "The instruction forced upon the child's 
 mind which does not correspond to its inner 
 stage of development and its measure of
 
 MISSING THE POINT. 9 1 
 
 power, robs him of his own original view of 
 things, and, with it, of his greatest power and 
 capacity to impress the stamp of his own in- 
 dividuality upon his being. Hence arises a 
 departure from nature which leads to cari- 
 cature." 
 
 Referring also to what was quoted in the 
 previous chapter on the differing environ- 
 ments and experiences of the city and the 
 country child, it is well to ask how far the 
 Twenty-third Psalm is fairly adapted to a city 
 child of six who has never seen a flock of 
 sheep, much less an Eastern shepherd ! 
 Apropos of this the distinguished Orientalist, 
 Canon Tristram, says: 
 
 " If the abundant imagery of Scripture, taken from 
 pastoral life, contains so many allusions foreign to what 
 we see in the tending of flocks in our own country, how 
 much more difficult must these allusions be to those who 
 know nothing of flocks, and never saw a sheep ? I felt 
 this last year, when, one Sunday in Ceylon, I was ad- 
 dressing, through an interpreter, a large congregation of 
 native Christians, and unfortunately chose the subject 
 of the good shepherd. My interpreter told me after- 
 ward that not one of my hearers had ever seen a sheep,
 
 92 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 or knew what it was. ' How, then, did you explain 
 what I said?' I asked. 'Oh! 'he replied, 'I turned 
 it into a buffalo that had lost its calf, and went into the 
 jungle to find it.' " 
 
 This interpreter probably knew nothing of 
 the science of teaching, and yet he had an in- 
 stinctive sense of the principle of the point of 
 contact on the plane of experience. Is there 
 not a suggestion here for us .'' 
 
 Another way of frequently missing the 
 point and so compelling children to express 
 adult sentiments and feelings entirely foreign 
 to the plane of child life is found in some of 
 the hymns they are asked to sing. Mrs. 
 George Archibald says : 
 
 " There is good sense, as well as fervent joy and full 
 assurance, in the verse which says : 
 
 • Come, sing to me of heaven, 
 ^\^len I'm about to die; 
 Sing songs of holy ecstasy 
 To waft my soul on high. 
 
 There'll be no sorrow there,' etc. 
 
 But, as children are not, ordinarily, about to die, shall 
 their s'^vritual songs be principally about heaven, and
 
 MISSING THE POINT. 93 
 
 expressive of an intense longing to go there ? Yet, 
 when we take pains to notice, we find in Sunday-school 
 hymns a vast amount of rime, time, tune, and measure de- 
 voted to chanting the desolation of life, the longing for 
 death, and a submissive waiting for release and glory. 
 What could be more unnatural ? 
 
 " The child's first effort is toward the continuance of its 
 earthly existence. The mother's first care has the same 
 object. The first warnings of the infant are those against 
 dangers that might imperil its life, — the flame, the edge- 
 tool, the flight of stairs. Its first work at school is as a 
 foundation for the needs of the terrestrial sojourn. And 
 its first spiritual teaching should be that of active good- 
 ness, and cheerful, kindly Christian endeavor in the 
 sphere to which it is born. 
 
 •"The home of the soul' may often fitly be the goal 
 of adult longing. But the first home of the soul is the 
 natural body. Let the children learn to magnify the 
 offices of this body. Let their songs be those which 
 will inspire their souls to use the lips, the hands and feet. 
 In the service of man, as the children of God." 
 
 Think of a primary school being taught to 
 sing: 
 
 " Art thou weary, art thou languid. 
 Art thou sore distressed ? 
 ' Come to me,' saith one, ' and coming, 
 Be at rest.'
 
 94 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 " If I Still hold closely to him. 
 What hath he at last ? 
 ' Sorrow vanquished, labor ended, 
 Jordan passed.' " 
 
 The child's plane may be spiritually quite as 
 elevated as that of the adult, but the mode of the 
 child's spiritual self-expression will be different. 
 
 There is another way of forcing an entrance 
 to the child's mind at an unnatural and dan- 
 gerous point. Doubters, agnostics, skeptics, 
 or infidels, are not found in early childhood. 
 When children inquire, they do it because 
 they want to know more, not because they 
 doubt. It is therefore a fatal mistake to ad- 
 dress the child as if he were a skeptic. 
 
 A discerning student of the child, a pri- 
 mary worker. Miss Lida B. Robertson, says: 
 "Jesus is 'the way, the truth, and the life,' 
 and our teachings of him should be positive, 
 and not negative. We do him and the pu- 
 pils irremediable harm to fill their embryo 
 minds with the accursed doubts of scribes, 
 Pharisees, and Sadducees, in order that we 
 may try to prove the truth to them."
 
 MISSING THE POINT. 95 
 
 Even if a child has unfortunately been in 
 an unbelieving environment, and so may be 
 said to have had some experience with that 
 phase of life, points of contact with it are 
 not to be taken merely because they seem to 
 touch his experience. Observe, this ruling 
 is not arbitrary, but is based largely on the 
 fact that unbelief is not on a plane natural to 
 the condition of childhood. Skepticism, if 
 it can be found in a little child, has been re- 
 ceived through suggestion from without, and 
 is therefore abnormal and premature. Any 
 suggestion of unbelief is liable to beget unbe- 
 lief. It is time enough to deal with it later, 
 when it is begotten. 
 
 It remains now to show how the point of 
 contact with child experience is often missed 
 though the misuse of objects or " symbols " 
 which do not symbolize. I quote at length 
 from an address on this subject by Miss Anna 
 W. Williams, the Superintendent of Public 
 Kindergartens in Philadelphia. She says : 
 
 " The object or ' symbol,' as it is falsely called, as 
 generally applied in Sunday-school, docs not give a child
 
 96 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 a clearer vision of truth, but rather leads him away from 
 it. We confuse the application of symbol to the adult 
 and the child's interpretation of it. Symbolism to the 
 adult is the representation of spiritual truth by means of 
 material things; to the child the symbol stands for an 
 object. For instance, ' Thy word is a lamp unto my 
 feet, and a light unto my path,' referred to the custom 
 of wearing lamps on the feet to prevent the bite of ser- 
 pents, and to avoid other dangers. This illustration is 
 meaningless to any human being, whether adult or child, 
 who has not felt the guidance of God's word in a dark 
 hour of life, and the need of such. A child must have 
 the experience before he can interpret the symbol. 
 Showing him a foot with a lamp on it does not give ex- 
 perience, which is the essential element of the story ; it 
 simply tells him the method of lighting the path in Ori- 
 ental countries. 
 
 " Let me recapitulate. The idea must be gained 
 through life experience, through feeling, before the sym- 
 bol means anything. ' If thine eye offend thee, pluck it 
 out, and cast it from thee.' No child could feei the 
 meaning of this figure of speech, since he has had no 
 life experience of gangrenous sickness and the corrupt- 
 ing power of sin. Children do not look beyond the im- 
 mediate sin, while the adult does realize the mass of cor- 
 rupting evil that grows from what we call ' minor sins,' 
 such as speaking ill of one's neighbors, leading to 
 greater sin, such as neglect of prayer. 
 
 "A child's use of symbolism is a totally different one. 
 He explains one thing by another thing. He makes a
 
 MISSING THE POINT. 97 
 
 chair (a thing) represent a train of cars (another thing), 
 his father's cane a horse. He would never put the cane 
 for something he did not understand. He makes one 
 thing he understands represent another thing he under- 
 stands. For instance, he would never of himself use the 
 spiritual expression, « My soul doth magnify the Lord ' 
 by the use of a magnifying glass in his hand, as has been 
 done in illustrating a Sunday-school lesson. ' Magnify ' 
 — to make great, larger in size than a common glass can 
 do — in no way expresses Mary's feeling of exaltation in 
 the greatness and loving-kindness of God, and the honor 
 given to her, as she expresses it in the Magnificat. . . . 
 
 " In a religious paper appeared sixty symbols used to 
 illustrate texts of Scripture. I will quote some of them, 
 and attempt to show clearly the false application. 
 
 " ' A pretty lamp with no oil in it,' or • an apple with 
 a decayed heart,' for ' man looketh on the outward ap- 
 pearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.' In the 
 first place, the lamp is without all its powers. God does 
 not make us without ability to give light ; hence it is not 
 a complete symbol, even to the adult mind. 
 
 " The apple with the fair outside and rotten centre is 
 beyond a little child's thought in regard to people. He 
 does not penetrate in this analytic way into others. We 
 teach him, if we teach him anything, not to sit on a 
 judgment-seat in regard to his neighbors. He thinks 
 people mean what they say, are what they appear to be. 
 Having a fair outside and a bad heart is not a part of 
 his experience. The idea of the hypocrisy of the world 
 does not belong to a young child's mind. Are we no'
 
 98 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 suggesting a bad motive to him before the good is 
 firmly established ? He learns that fact later in life 
 from his own experience, and the learning of it does not 
 make him a better man. . . . W'e must get the feeling 
 of the love of God thoroughly impressed by presentation 
 of his loving side before wandering from him will give 
 an inward pang. 
 
 " ' A suit of silver armor,' for ' Put on the whole armor 
 of God.' One serious objection to this silver display is 
 that the armor is so attractive that the child's attention 
 is called from the thought to the thing, and held there. 
 This figure, too, comes in Ephesians, which represents 
 the high-water mark of Paul's experience, and requires 
 the richest and fullest experience of Christian culture to 
 apprehend the spiritual application. Let me repeat : 
 the attractiveness of the object chains the child's atten- 
 tion to the thing rather than the thought, and we spend 
 our whole lives in trying to spring away from things of 
 sense to spiritual things. Such display materially de- 
 feats the purpose intended to be accomplished. 
 
 " ' A paper pattern and scissors ' for Christ our pattern 
 is grossly materialistic. A story of one action of Christ's 
 rife, to inculcate the thought of the text, would be in- 
 finitely better. The child may understand the meaning 
 of the wora • pattern ' better by means of this concrete 
 illustration, but surely not the word ' example,' for 
 which it stanas. How can a paper pattern represent 
 holiness, spirituality, etc. ? It associates a great and 
 holy thing, too, with an external triviality of life, and 
 sets more store by the word than the idea.
 
 MISSING THE POINT. 99 
 
 " Let us be careful that our Sunday-school does not 
 drift into a system of object lessons that are materializing 
 the child. If you show a red cardboard cross to-day, 
 you must show a blue one on the succeeding Sunday, or 
 some other more enticing object, if you are going to 
 draw them by sense attraction. 
 
 " May it not be possible, with such methods as our 
 Sunday-schools are adopting to-day, that when the child 
 reaches maturity he may have a contempt, not for the 
 teacher, but for her presentations of great truths, and, 
 when the spiritual light dawns on him, his vision may 
 be obscured by the materialistic view of his childhood ? " 
 
 It is not merely the starting-points, then, 
 that must be within the child's range of ex- 
 perience, but it is the whole teaching which 
 proceeds step by step from it. This means 
 not only that we must find the proper points 
 of contact, but that the body of lesson ma- 
 terial itself be appropriately selected for its 
 simplicity, positivity, immediateness, concrete- 
 ness, connectedness, and spiritual suggestive- 
 ness.
 
 V 
 
 THE LESSON MATERIAL
 
 THE LESSON MATERIAL 
 
 It is a much heralded idea among Sunday- 
 school teachers that it makes little or no dif- 
 ference what the subject-matter of the Bible- 
 study lesson is, provided the teacher " adapt " 
 it to the children. It is contended that the 
 selection of uniform lessons for pupils of all 
 ages is quite consistent with the demand for 
 graded instruction; and that the grading 
 should be, not in the subject-matter, but in 
 the method of its impartation. 
 
 We shall not here debate the question as 
 to whether "experience " has proved this (as 
 is claimed) or not. It is, indeed, rather a 
 (]ucstion of what the child's experience is 
 with us, than ours with him, and the trend of 
 evidences in the foregoing chapters must suf- 
 fice. The issue which I make is, that choice 
 of material is the first essential and the 
 
 103
 
 104 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 method of presenting the material comes sec^ 
 ond. Child nature and individual interests 
 are the real choosers. 
 
 Some Scripture passages are certainly bet> 
 ter for some purposes than others. Now the 
 little child is a very different sort of purpose 
 from the man or woman or the youth. It is 
 therefore quite reasonable to suppose that 
 some Scripture lessons would be better than 
 others for a child. 
 
 No teacher more carefully selected his ma- 
 terial according to his pupils' plane of expe- 
 rience than our Lord. As has been shown, 
 Jesus went to the people at their point of 
 contact with life, and, though a carpenter, he 
 never drew a figure from his own calling, but 
 from theirs. In The Biblical World, Lincoln 
 Owen well says : 
 
 " In all phases of intellectual education we recognize 
 an intimate connection between tiling, idea, and word ; 
 in more general terms, between reality, tliought, and 
 language. Word and language cannot have for the 
 child appropriate meaning until he has the appropriate 
 experience. Hence, it is a psychological necessity to 
 Start with the child's experiences; to make indefinite
 
 TKE LESSON MA'' ERIAL. IO5 
 
 and chaotic experiences definite and oiderly ; to supply 
 pattern experiences ; to connect his experiences with the 
 appropriate language. The teacher may begin at either 
 end of the series, but progress and clearness require that 
 the entire series be mastered. Much indefinite and 
 hazy work results from the wordiness of instruction. 
 The constant problem in teaching children is to make 
 language significant. In the Sunday-school there seems 
 to be a necessity to start with the language end of the 
 series, and much of the verbal instruction there fails to 
 get associated with any experience, and is accordingly 
 faulty." 
 
 But apart from this, if we recognize the 
 right of each child to his individuality, we 
 should recognize the right of childhood to its 
 individuality. It seems almost humiliating to 
 plead for a truth so well understood in every 
 other sphere except that of Sunday-school in- 
 struction. Would any sensible parent con- 
 sent to send his children to a secular primary 
 school where there was no choice of lesson 
 material, but where any and every subject, 
 however abstruse and remote from the child's 
 plane of thought, was ordered to be " adapted " 
 by the teacher.? Such "adaptation" as one 
 often sees is a misnomer. It results in a
 
 I06 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 nominal instruction, but not real teaching of 
 the essential truth involved in the assigned 
 text. 
 
 If it be claimed that any and every text in 
 the Bible is suitable for the children provided 
 it be suitably " adapted " by the teacher, I let 
 the words of Pestalozzi answer : " The re- 
 form needed is not that the school coach 
 should be better horsed, but that it should be 
 turned right around and started on a new 
 track." 
 
 The turning around will be the adoption 
 of material selected especially from the child's 
 point of view, as well as the ordering of the 
 services and the mode of address to the child 
 upon his own plane of sense, thought, and 
 feeling. In fact, this latter — feeling — is one 
 of the neglected aims in early education. 
 The filling of the child mind with " infor- 
 mation " is a small service to humanity com- 
 pared with the education of the feelings. 
 The primary school that begets reverence 
 alone has done a large work. Appreciation 
 and affection must precede formal thought.
 
 THE LESSON MATERIAL. IO7 
 
 The needs, desires, purposes, pains, and 
 pleasures of a horse, a cat, a fly, a flower, 
 antedate in the child's heart the knowledge 
 of their anatomy in the child's mind. It is 
 better to lead a child to love a tree than to 
 calculate the lumber in it. Professor Martin 
 G. Brumbaugh, of Pennsylvania, suggestively 
 says: 
 
 "John James Audubon had his boyhood home in a 
 cave on the banks of the Perkiomen creek, in Mont- 
 gomery County. It was here that his soul was tilled 
 with rapturous love for bird-life. It was this love that 
 led him for a quarter of a century into the secret haunts 
 of humming-bird and oriole. First an artist, then a 
 scientist. It was self-directed research after his own 
 plan, investigation prompted of love, that made possible 
 the growth into the first ornithologist of America, per- 
 haps of the world. And this is typical of the process 
 in each life. It is a great moment in a boy's life when 
 he first meets in the world of things the object for which 
 his soul yearned — when he finds the things he loves and 
 the things that link him lovingly to the great world 
 without. A pupil of mine, dull and listless in his work 
 for a year, was finally persuaded by his teacher to study 
 botany. He did his text-book work in an indifferent 
 and listless manner. Early in June, on a rainy after- 
 noon, he accompanied his class to a private haunt of the
 
 I08 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 orchid family. Here the boy unexpectedly found a rare 
 specimen, and, throwing himself upon the wet ground 
 beside the beautiful flower, wept for joy, and, between 
 his sobs, called alternately to his teacher and his God in 
 his moment of supreme exaltation. That boy found the 
 thing he loved. He loved all its associates, and be- 
 came one of the best botanists Juniata College ever pro- 
 duced." 
 
 Perhaps some one urges that we do not 
 bring the boys to Sunday-school to teach them 
 to become botanists. No. But this boy was 
 dull and listless as many a Sunday-school pupil 
 is listless. The Bible is made to stand between 
 him and life as this teacher's text-book stood 
 between his pupil and life. Bible words, like 
 all other words, must find their interpretation 
 in experience. There must have been an 
 experience in the child's life to interpret them 
 and use them before they can be efficient in 
 the child's spiritual education and life. Hence 
 the need of a wise choice of the lesson ma- 
 terial if we would have it educative instead 
 of arrestive of development. 
 
 Miss Blow, speaking deprecatingly of the 
 lack of clear insight in the choice of themes,
 
 THE LESSON MATERIAL. lOQ 
 
 says : " It would seem that the selection of 
 suitable themes is a matter of prime import." 
 And a writer in The Westminster Review 
 says : " What is true of bodily food is true 
 also of spiritual food. Children's intellects 
 cannot digest that which is suited to adults; 
 and however sincerely religious beliefs may 
 be held by parents, this does not prevent them 
 from assuming a different complexion in the 
 mind of a child. At second hand they are 
 not merely useless, but pernicious." And 
 Inspector Hughes of Toronto : " No greater 
 wrong can be inflicted on a child than to try 
 to make it exhibit the characteristics of the 
 religious life of maturity either in profession 
 or practice. The only certain product of 
 such training is a hypocrite." And Frocbcl : 
 " We should not forget that instruction should 
 start from the pupil's own life and proceed 
 from it like a bud or sprout." 
 
 Says Herbert Spencer: "Good exposition 
 implies much constructive imagination. A 
 prerequisite is the forming of true ideas of 
 the mental states of those who arc to be
 
 no POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 taught ; and a further prerequisite is the im- 
 agining of methods by which, beginning with 
 conceptions which they possess, there may be 
 built up in their minds the conceptions they 
 do not possess. Of constructive imagina- 
 tion, as displayed in this sphere, men at large 
 appear to be almost devoid ; as witness the 
 absurd systems of teaching which in past 
 times, and in large measure at present, have 
 stupefied, and still stupefy, children." 
 
 Says Louis Heilprin : "We teach a child 
 to bound every state in the world, and make 
 him learn all the capitals, before he has the 
 slightest interest in land that he has not seen. 
 We teach him to locate a long array of capes 
 and promontories without his having any 
 conception of their significance as land- 
 marks. . . . We drag him from one corner 
 to another of the great tableau of history, 
 and compel him to take in its insignificant 
 details before he has been given a chance to 
 acquire any interest in any age but his own." 
 
 And Professor Jackman, in The School 
 Journal, with great acuteness says :
 
 THE LESSON MATERIAL. Ill 
 
 "The child's pictures of a great flat, and perfectly 
 motionless, earth, and of the sun, a relatively small bur- 
 nished disk, daily traversing the sky, just out of reach 
 of the birds, have all been so honestly earned that it 
 seems almost wrong to undeceive him. As the subject 
 is usually presented in the common schools, there is no 
 excuse for the attempt that is made to disturb his early 
 impressions. The teacher's first act is to smite him with 
 the statement that the earth is round ; then, in exchange 
 for the pupil's earth — with all its flatness, still a world 
 of bewildering beauty and intense interest — the teacher 
 presents him with a six-inch pasteboard globe and bids 
 him think on that. It is a barter which the soul of the 
 pupil never sanctions, and the result is that although he 
 ever after dutifully says : ' The earth is round like a 
 globe or ball,' the picture of the dear o\(\Jlat earth of his 
 childhood forever remains as the actual basis of all his 
 geographic thinking. 
 
 " The fact is, the pupil will never exchange his flat 
 earth of actual experience for the pasteboard globe of the 
 teacher's desk ; nay, he will not trade it for the round 
 earth itself until, through an equally actual experience, 
 the latter gradually fills up as a great picture and lays 
 hold of his imagination and his life as did the one of his 
 early years. Whatever may be in the child's experience 
 when he enters school, whether right or wrong, the 
 teacher may rest assured that usually it has been acquired 
 through honest growth ; if education is to correct or 
 expand this experience, it can be done only through 
 processes of growth just as gradual and equally genuine.
 
 112 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 " It is, tlierefore, a serious task for him who seeks to 
 disrupt the child's experience by teaching him that the 
 earth is round; that it is flying through space nearly 
 nineteen miles every second. . . . Facts which actually 
 subvert his whole experience by some means must be 
 made to appear more reasonable than the very things 
 which he has seen before his own eyes all his life." 
 
 So far as geographical and historical aspects 
 go, the best general criticism is that we intro- 
 duce them too early. 
 
 All this fairly pictures our tendency, in all 
 dealings with the child, to keep him in the 
 remote instead of the near, and in minor 
 details to him disconnected and unrelated, 
 instead of large simple generals or wholes, 
 indigenous to his plane of experience. 
 
 It will not do to show the weakness and 
 harmfulness of our present systems without in- 
 dicating in what direction reform must lie. It 
 is not my part or purpose to work out the details 
 of a primary Bible course or program. Nor is 
 it essential that every instructor, in order to be 
 familiar with the principle of the point of 
 contact and the plane of experience, should 
 be expert in the construction of lesson
 
 THE LESSON MATERIAL. II3 
 
 courses. But some basal suggestions, some 
 foundation principles, may be here laid down 
 for completeness' sake. 
 
 The Bible is a complex of abstracts and 
 concretes, of history, biography, poetry, 
 ethics, prophecy, law, doctrine, etc., em- 
 bracing also many bloody and, to us, revolt- 
 ing historical pictures, altogether unsuitable 
 for a child's reading. It is therefore, as a 
 text-book, unique, and accordingly difficult 
 of presentation. The result is that our 
 instruction courses are likewise too full and 
 complex. There is too much formal " teach- 
 ing." Dr. W. T. Harris says : " It is 
 believed that arrested development of the 
 higher mental and moral faculties is caused 
 in many cases by the school. The habit of 
 teaching with too much thoroughness and 
 too long-continued drill the semi-mechanical 
 branches of study, such as arithmetic, spell- 
 ing, the discrimination of colors, the obser- 
 vation of surface and solid forms, and even 
 the distinctions of formal grammar, often
 
 114 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 leaves the pupil fixed in lower stages of 
 growth and unable to exercise the higher 
 functions of thought." It will be urged that 
 this does not apply to religious work as these 
 branches are not taught in Sunday-schools. 
 But a candid investigation of much of the 
 drill of the Sunday-school will disclose an 
 alarming aptness in Dr. Harris's words. 
 
 Beginning where we find the pupil, then, 
 we must take a (ew near-at-hand points in 
 the child's experience, — objects, or activities 
 in the home, in nature, parental and filial 
 relations, etc. These must be combined 
 or thought into a simple, easily-conceived 
 whole. Froebel, speaking of the family, says : 
 
 " This feeling of community, first uniting the child 
 with mother, father, brothers, and sisters, and resting on 
 a higher spiritual unity, to which later on is added the 
 unmistakable discovery that father, mother, brothers, 
 sisters, human beings in general, feel and know them- 
 selves to be in community and unity with a higher prin- 
 ciple — with humanity, with God — this feeling of com- 
 munity is the very first germ of all true religious spirit, 
 of all genuine yearning for unhindered unification with 
 the eternal, with God."
 
 THE LESSON MATERIAL. II5 
 
 But what of children of depraved and 
 cruel parents ? Manifestly home is not the 
 starting-point for such a child's reach to a 
 Heavenly Father. But somewhere the child 
 will have found a chum, a friend, a human 
 helper, as a germ for the larger feeling toward 
 the Divine Friend and Parent. 
 
 We must observe peoples before we talk 
 about "a peculiar people," "the chosen 
 people." "The simplest general whole," 
 says Colonel Parker, is the " first objective 
 point," And " the plain rule of procedure, 
 in going from the part to the whole, is to 
 form a real whole that can be most easily 
 imagined or appreciated. . . . The anatomy 
 of a finger or a muscle is more difficult than the 
 anatomy of the entire framework of the body." 
 A child understands sentences and phrases of 
 which he does not understand the isolated 
 words. He can swing his arms mightily, 
 albeit he cannot control his fingers precisely. 
 
 Pursuing the germinal idea of dependent 
 and affectionate personal relations we ap- 
 proach the idea of Creator and Father of
 
 Il6 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHINCJ. 
 
 all. Next we might aim for the concept of 
 communication through the simple percepts 
 of speech, books, etc. ; then a great simple, 
 general whole again, a concept of prayer, or 
 of revelation, — the Bible. The way is thus 
 naturally and logically opened for the later 
 revelation of God in human form, — the 
 Word "made flesh." (All the steps that 
 this paragraph implies cannot, of course, be 
 detailed here. Nor is it meant to say that 
 this is the only course, but rather that it is the 
 only right principle of beginning and of pro- 
 ceeding, — from the known or, better, the 
 already felt interest to the unknown.) But 
 we must not go too fast in working out 
 such a program. Repetition, constant and 
 frequent, is essential. Here is where the 
 present International lesson system fails sadly 
 with young children, and indeed the same is 
 true of most other systems of Bible lessons. 
 It were better to use the same Bible story 
 twelve times over than to have twelve stories 
 with no repetition. The same story should 
 be varied in mode at each telling, giving the
 
 THE LESSON MATERIAL. II7 
 
 child the opportunity of discovery of the 
 identity. Observe also that even this simple 
 program is liable to be worked out too 
 speedily into mere thought forms instead of 
 addressing itself to the feelings. Appre- 
 ciations and affections, attitudes of being in- 
 stead of movements toward knowing, imaged 
 ideals for willing — these are the goal. 
 
 Recalling again that young children have 
 very little idea of time and space, we must 
 consequently avoid much dependence upon 
 interests rooted in them. It is useless to 
 take children step by step from Egypt to the 
 Promised Land until they have a compre- 
 hensive view, a simple idea of Israel (whether 
 we call it " Israelites," " Hebrews," "Jews," 
 " peculiar people," or any other name) from 
 Abraham to the modern Jew. The complex 
 of historical details within that view cannot 
 be appreciated. *'The fatal mistake," says 
 Colonel Parker, " of many teachers ... is 
 that of leading pupils into the search for (to 
 the teachers) alluring details, instead of teach- 
 ing just enough of facts to subserve the pur-
 
 Il8 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 poses of clear and simple generalizations." 
 Creeping week by week from the Creation 
 to Joshua or David or Zerubbabel is utterly 
 futile if the intention is to be historical or 
 chronological. Herbart observes that the im- 
 pression of the present moment throws the 
 one previously apprehended too quickly below 
 the threshold of consciousness. 
 
 Moreover, the distracting details are a seri- 
 ous interference with the child's generalizing 
 powers. There is no implication here that 
 children do not feel great religious truths. 
 But I mean to emphasize the difference be- 
 tween the simple and the complex, between 
 the high and the intricate. Hawthorne saw 
 that " children possess an unestimated sensi- 
 bility to whatever is deep or high, in imagi- 
 nation or feeling, so long as it is simple like- 
 wise. It is only the artificial and the com- 
 plex that bewilder them." Dr. Nicholas 
 Murray Butler finely says that " the highest 
 and most enduring knowledge is of the things 
 of the spirit. That subtle sense of the beau- 
 tiful and the sublime which accompanies
 
 THE LESSON MATERIAL. II9 
 
 spiritual insight, and is part of it, — this is the 
 highest achievement of which humanity is 
 capable. It is typified, in various forms, in 
 the verse of Dante, and the prose of Thomas 
 a Kempis, in the Sistine Madonna of Raphael, 
 and in Mozart's Requiem. To develop this 
 sense in education is the task of art and lit- 
 erature, to interpret it is the work of philos- 
 ophy, and to nourish it the function of reli- 
 gion." The child is born on the highway 
 to this "highest achievement." Let us not 
 block this way by a meddlesome multiplicity 
 of words, words, words. 
 
 Again, we must have always in mind a 
 simple idea of personal and loving relations, 
 centring in the God-ward. Here the value 
 of Bible stories is very positive. They lead 
 pupils to put themselves in the place of 
 others, and to look for causes and conse- 
 quences. If they touch the child's experi- 
 ence, and arouse his curiosity, they educate 
 memory, quicken desire, enforce moral, sug- 
 gest standards, become a basis of action in the 
 pursuit of ideals, and so develop character.
 
 I20 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 The Stories must, however, be wisely 
 selected, and, as already shown, they must 
 be repeated. The continuous depicting of 
 bloodshed and horrors in the illustrations 
 given in certain Bible story-books for chil- 
 dren, is simply barbarous. A child should 
 not get as a dominant thought of God the 
 idea of retribution, of killing, warring, etc. I 
 know of a little child who was overheard tell- 
 ing a companion that she didn't believe "that 
 story about the ark because she knew God 
 would never drown people that way." Nor 
 ought early impressions of God's Book to 
 consist mainly of such things as are repellent 
 to a sensitive nature, especially in its most 
 impressible period. The child cannot have 
 sufficient knowledge of situations and of socio- 
 logical conditions to justify a repeated exhibit 
 of vengeance and horror. For like reason 
 the physical sufferings of our Lord on the 
 cross must not be too minutely pictured, and 
 his death ought seldom to be mentioned apart 
 from his rising again. Then, too, the stories 
 must have a certain simple completeness of
 
 THE LESSON MATERIAL. 121 
 
 their own, and not be too dependent on re- 
 mote causes and complications, or on peculiar 
 local conditions. 
 
 The stories must have in them that which 
 educates and stimulates right feeling, which 
 forms ideals and leads to action. The story 
 ought to do this itself — or, more accurately, 
 the pupil, reacting to it, does it himself. In 
 attempting to point a moral the teacher usually 
 strangles the ideal at its birth in the child's 
 soul. If a story needs much moralizing it 
 were better not told at all. If the picture of 
 a heroic deed touches a child's natural inter- 
 est he feels the ideal born within him. "What 
 a child has felt he never forgets; what he has 
 merely been told he may not remember five 
 minutes," says Alice W. Rollins. And In- 
 spector Hughes observes, " 7 he habit of 
 * pointing the moral ' of tale or incident is a 
 kindred error to the practice of forcing ma- 
 ture theories of religion or adult practices on 
 the child." Miss Blow notes that the mind 
 may be trusted to do its own universalizing. 
 While it is true that no point of contact, or
 
 122 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 Starting-point, is likely to be equally service- 
 able for all members of a heterogeneous class 
 alike, it is also true that the moral of a story 
 will differ still more essentially for each one 
 who hears it. Hence the impropriety of 
 dictating the " application " to the class en 
 masse. One lesson the primary teachers have 
 yet to learn, and that is to let a good story do 
 its own work. Better say too little than too 
 much. 
 
 There can be no ideal program or course 
 of lessons for all alike. Differences of con- 
 dition among schools, and among the pupils 
 in the same school, forbid it. The great 
 variance in the qualifications of teachers, and 
 the power of old associations, predilections, 
 and prejudices, forbid it. And yet there is a 
 sense in which there can be a course, ideal in 
 its recognition of these difficulties, and in its 
 concessions to them. At the very least the 
 kindergarten basis of" an atmosphere of love " 
 together with " training in good habits, such 
 as order, obedience, punctuality, attention, in- 
 dustry " — as Eleanore Heerwart puts it — is
 
 THE LESSON MATERIAL. 1 23 
 
 always in order. To this 1 may add the 
 community sense which the kindergarten so 
 effectually begets in the child. Yet the Sun- 
 day-school is not, and should not be called, a 
 kindergarten, in any grade. 
 
 Recapitulating, we find that, in teaching 
 the child, child nature is the first considera- 
 tion ; that the child is capable of feeling cer- 
 tain profound spiritual intimations, although 
 he be incapable of receiving formal truths 
 through a conventional adult phraseology ; 
 that we must take the child where we find 
 him; that the mind feeds only upon that 
 which it assimilates and grows onlv through 
 its own self-activity; that we cannot force 
 this assimilation beyond a more or less well- 
 defined power of the child's nature ; that we 
 must proceed from experience-interests to an 
 unknown ; that from the concrete the pupil 
 must do his own abstracting and proceed to 
 his own concrete activity ; that we must 
 teach by wholes rather than in complications 
 of detail ; that the child mind has little power 
 of perceiving matters of time or space, and
 
 124 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 consequently can assimilate but little of his- 
 tory or geography ; that the connection of 
 one lesson with another must be a connec- 
 tion of thought and feeling rather than of mere 
 chronology or artifice ; that the narration of 
 things painful and horrible must be as far as 
 possible avoided ; that Bible and other stories 
 have an important pedagogical value, and that 
 instruction must be positive rather than nega- 
 tive or apologetic. In short, teaching is en- 
 abling another to restate the truth in terms of 
 his own life. If the pupil gives back only 
 what we have given him he has got nothing. 
 What he gives out in words or action must, 
 sooner or later, be a re-statement of the truth 
 in terms of his own self-activity. The 
 teacher's test of his work therefore is not the 
 test of a parrot but of a self-actively develop- 
 ing soul. 
 
 Any one who has attempted to build up a 
 primary course in which the foregoing prin- 
 ciples have been fairly respected, will have 
 discovered that, if he can construct one such 
 course, he can about as satisfactorily construct
 
 THE LESSON MATERIAL. 1 25 
 
 more. He will have found himself, at times, 
 in a strait betwixt two paths through Primary 
 Land. He comes now and again to a parting 
 of ways, both or all equally primary, equally 
 promising, all trending toward the same goal. 
 The resources arc great and varied. 
 
 The truth is that life is the only real in- 
 terpreter and educator. Our Sunday-schools 
 like our day schools are too bookish — too 
 much a thing apart from life relations, too 
 little a thing of atmosphere and attitude and 
 Christian endeavor. What Professor Dewey 
 says of the secular school is not inapt here. 
 
 "From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in 
 the school comes from his inability to utilize his experi- 
 ences he gets outside the school in any complete and free 
 way within the school itself; while on the other hand he 
 is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning at 
 school. That is the isolation of the school — its isolation 
 from life. When the child gets into the schoolroom he 
 has to put out of his mind a large part of the ideas, in- 
 terests, and activities that predominate in his home and 
 neighborhood. So the school being unable to utilize 
 this everyday experience, sets painfully to work on an- 
 other tack, and by a variety of means, to arouse in the 
 child an interest iii school studies. While 1 was visiting
 
 126 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 in the city of Moline a few years ago, the superintendent 
 told me that they found many children every year who 
 were surprised to learn that the Mississippi River in the 
 text-book had anything to do with the stream of water 
 flowing past their homes." 
 
 How many children that recite the Beati- 
 tudes or the penitential Psalms realize that 
 they have anything to do with the stream of 
 human lives that passes by their home doors ? 
 Again : 
 
 " The child comes to the traditional school with a 
 healthy body and a more or less unwilling mind, though, 
 in fact, he does not bring both his body and mind with 
 him ; he has to leave his mind behind, because there is 
 no way to use it in the school. If he had a purely ab- 
 stract mind, he could bring it to school with him, but his 
 is a concrete one, interested in concrete things, and un- 
 less these things get over into school life, he cannot take 
 his mind with him." 
 
 This is written about the secular school, 
 but its application, in a degree at least, to the 
 Sunday-school, is apparent. It must be more 
 closely coordinated with, or related to, life. 
 It must depend less upon mere verbal mem- 
 orizing and forms of philosophic thought and
 
 THE LKi^bON MATKKIAL. 1 27 
 
 Statement which cannot be carried over into 
 daily living. 
 
 The Book of Genesis is not genesis to the 
 child. Daylight comes before the sun. If 
 we think we can teach the child the Bible 
 best in what, to an adult, is consecutive order, 
 because it is literary order or historical order, 
 we deceive ourselves. We are not bringing 
 the child the truth in his orderly way, even if 
 it is ours. Connection and order to us are 
 not necessarily order or connection to him. 
 
 The true primary course progresses by 
 topics, through concrete imagery, logically, — 
 not by book, chronologically. The life ex- 
 perience of the child determines what the 
 topics shall be, and "Testaments," as Testa- 
 ments, are not in the case. Out of life the 
 primal lesson material is to come if it is to be 
 assimilated and lived out again. The law of 
 Unity, says Hughes, teaches that " isolated 
 knowledge is unproductive, and that it will 
 not remain in the mind, even when relation- 
 ship is shown by explanations or illustrations 
 by the teacher. . . . The living process of
 
 128 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 relationship must be thought out, and, if pos- 
 sible, wrought out, by the pupil himself, in 
 order to make the knowledge a positive ele- 
 ment in character. ... It is wrong to give 
 formal knowledge before laying a foundation 
 for it by establishing apperceptive centres for 
 it by experience." 
 
 The Sunday-school can as little afford to 
 ignore or to repudiate those fundamental 
 pedagogical laws upon which all great edu- 
 cators are now practically agreed, as can the 
 secular school. Education is education, no 
 matter what name the school goes by. The 
 Sunday-school suffers from a hallucination 
 that, because it is a religious institution, it 
 must educate by some method peculiar to it- 
 self, — a method which too easily presumes on 
 God's willingness to make good our senti- 
 mentally lazy shortcomings. 
 
 It will be a long time yet before we fully 
 realize that the child under eight is not a mere 
 diminutive adult ; that he has strictly no his- 
 toric consciousness, very little appreciation of 
 the remote in cause or effect, in time or in
 
 THE LESSON MATERIAL. 1 29 
 
 space ; and that he has no business with any 
 series of facts which, because of the half- 
 wrong impression which he must needs get 
 of them, make " utter nonsense or mere 
 verbal cram of the most careful instruction." 
 
 The truth is that the child is robbed of his 
 right as a child by our everlastingly thinking 
 of him only as the coming man. We think 
 too much of what he may be, and not enough 
 of what he is. The perfect child is not made 
 by forcing him into an adult mold. Even 
 Jesus had to be a baby before he could be- 
 come a man. " It is dangerous," says the 
 immortal Froebcl, " to interfere in any way 
 with a ripening process." 
 
 Apart from this, any child may finish his 
 mission in childhood. Out of every thou- 
 sand children, over two hundred die before 
 they reach nine years of age. Who can 
 measure the influence which children have 
 had upon history ? I refer not merely to their 
 attractions and sweetening influence upon us 
 — that were adult egotism. I refer to their 
 direct powers, — powers which we have lost,
 
 130 POINT OF CONTACT IN TEACHING. 
 
 powers which convention and artifice have 
 pressed and dried out of us. 
 
 " Our simple childhood sits upon a throne 
 That hath more power than all the elements." 
 
 It is idle, if not immoral, to suppose that 
 because we are trying to teach God's word 
 to children we can therefore ignore the de- 
 mands and defy the laws of child nature. 
 God never works a miracle to relieve us from 
 our obligation to use common sense. Our 
 Lord respected the child's point of view, and 
 gave it a foremost place. He never told the 
 child to be as a man, although he did tell the 
 man to be as a child. A child is entitled to 
 all that goes with childhood, no matter 
 whether we are dealing with him in secular 
 or in " religious " matters. 
 
 The remedy for our evils lies in com- 
 manding child nature by obeying child na- 
 ture ; in inducting a child into a subject 
 through his natural point of contact with life, 
 his concrete sense experiences, his activities, 
 his appreciations, his affections. In short, the
 
 THE LESSON MATERIAL. I3I 
 
 child's Genesis is not the man's Genesis. 
 The story of the beginnings of things is by 
 no means the beginning of the story of 
 things. The child was not made forties- 
 sons," but lessons must be made for the 
 child. And all our teaching must look to the 
 education of the heart through the intelligent, 
 loving exercise of a consecrated will.
 
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