Are we giving time enough to religious education? What marked tendencies of a religious character assert themselves at the age of adolescence? Why should adolescent pupils remain in the Sundayschool? What are you doing to keep them there? May we complacently resign our children to the secular school and demand of it their complete education? What reasons may be assigned for the relatively small number of young men and women in the Sunday-school? Do you try-really, earnestly try to impress upon your pupils the full value of a knowledge of the Bible? Write a list of services you know the Bible has been to you, to civilization. What is the best service man can render to God through teaching? XXVIII THE SCOPE OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION OHN RUSKIN once said that there were but Three Great three questions that concerned the human soul; that if the human soul could propound to itself these three questions, and answer them, it had justified its right to be. The first of these questions is this: How did I get into this world? The second: How am I going to get out of this world? And third: What had I best do under the circumstances? In other words, the three great concerns of life center themselves around the thoughts of our origin, our destiny and our duty, and we have scarcely approached the problem of duty until we see that problem in the light of our destiny, and in the light of our origin; for unless we understand that with which we are endowed, and that for which we have been endowed, we will scarcely be able to make a rational use of our lives. We may safely leave the question of our origin and of our destiny to God. The question of our duty we must face. What had we best do under the circumstances? When one comes to a consideration of the The Moral Life moral life, the life which sets before itself the standard of living up to its best thought, one has at once a heroic conception of the human soul. If, to-day, we had an appreciable group of people who were heroic enough always to do the things which they know are best to do, we would at once have a most wholesome leaven in our civilization. The Religious If, to the thought that one is to live up to his best knowledge, is added the additional fact that where one's knowledge fails to give guidance one must trust a higher and diviner guidance, so that the life begins with thought and ends with faith, one has the real conception of the religious character. I take it that the child in the home lives heroically when it lives up to all that it has been taught, and, in the absence of guidance from that side, lives up, in the next place, to the example of its parents, its teachers, and those who stand above it in years and experience, as examples of what should be best in life. And so, in all the years of our growth we need, not merely the heroic moral quality, that makes us do the best things we know, but also the higher religious quality that makes us willing to be led in the hours when our own thought and our own guidance fail to give us direction. If to the moral conception of life's duty we add the acceptance of a divine personality, revealed to mankind in some form, and apprehended as God, we have the religious life of the race. There are three great virtues in civilization. There are three great qualities in life to which every one of us should be dedicated. There are three virtues of the human soul that every individual should strive to achieve. And to the extent that we manifest these, live them in the midst of our fellows, to that extent may we be said to live truly, and to live nobly. Virtue of There is, first of all, the virtue of civilization, with which every soul should be invested. The virtue of civilization is politeness. Not that surface politeness that makes a man act a part in society, but that genuine politeness of the soul which makes each one treat each other as if each were a perfect human being; for the very genius of politeness lies in the fact that we act to every man as if he were perfect: that makes our action as perfect as we can make it. And there is always in society the need for this. We are altogether too gruff, altogether too harsh, altogether too uncivil-due to the many influences at work upon our lives; and we need conscientiously, not only in our childhood, but in our maturer years, to be taught that a part of the real virtue of life is in the politeness with which we meet one another, and in the courtesy with which we come in touch with fellow-beings in the world. No system of education that has in mind the development of the higher virtues of the religious life can possibly ignore this fundamental need of civilization to the individual; for, in a very appreciable way, the objective measure of civilization may be found in the changed way with which we deal with one another. The rude savage knows none of the courtesies of life. His code is harsh; his doctrine is destructive; his activity is selfish. But, in our later civilization, we have overcome in part, and we need to overcome in a larger way, all those qualities of the barbaric spirit, and we need to incorporate into each one civilization's best gift to us, the courtesy, the kindly good will, that should characterize enlightened human life. The second of the great virtues of the human soul is the virtue of morality, which is conscientiousness, as contrasted with the virtue of civilization, which is politeness. It means a great Virtue of deal to you, and it means a great deal to me, to have around us everywhere people who are living conscientiously; that is to say, who put their best conscience, their most honest endeavor, into |