are after, because its season's work is spread out, an hour or two a day, and to get it all you must stay longer than our people can afford. The work of the assembly is confessedly vacation work; it provides a good time, with instruction sandwiched in. No Sunday school would pay the expenses of from one to six of its teachers for three or four weeks at such a place, nor would the teachers accept such a bounty. Our work is crowded into one busy week; and while on the ground the student gets all the work his powers can stand. If he wants a vacation, he stays another week to "rest up," but he does that at his own charges. Moreover, (2) while it is conceivable that the formal instruction of an assembly class might equal or exceed that of a weeklong institute, the life-imparting power of the crowded session is lacking; nor can public opinion be evoked or new vision of truth be crystallized into resolutions and plans of action, as has repeatedly occurred at the Asbury Park School. We are a club as well as a school; we evolve truth as well as teach it; we criticise and reshape our own last year's plans, in the light of experience reported and discussed. The assembly class has its large and important functions, but it is not a summer Sunday school institute, and cannot take the place of that distinct instrumentality.

A successful summer Sunday school institute must have:

I. A field. It must be strategically placed, and must stand for the needs of the Sunday school teachers in a fairly well-marked area, while welcoming students from any quarter.

2. A home, some spot that shall seem attractive and comfortable in hot weather, and to which husbands and friends may also come without seeming peculiar. A proper building, secured on generous terms, is of course also essential.

3. A backer, some responsible organization already working for the teachers, and in a position to guarantee and partly raise the four or five hundred dollars that a good school of this sort will cost. This organization is usually the state Sunday school association; but the Chautauqua Assembly ran such a school several year ago, and the University of West Virginia had one as part of its regular summer school work last year.

4. A circle of progressive teachers, from among whom the needed workers can be drawn, and whose combined ideas and convictions will constitute the capital of public opinion needed to begin business on. This condition it indispensable. If lacking in any field, it would probably be wiser to take preliminary steps to develop such a circle, even if that should mean the postponing of the enterprise for two or

three years. The school must be a living organization, not a dead construction.

5. A committee of management, which should as far as possible actually represent the teachers for whom provision is to be made. If the backers proceed on the assumption that they know what the teachers need, and then draft their programme and hire their speakers, their failure is foredoomed. Only the teachers know what the teachers need, and they do not know as much now as they will know when the sessions are over. The members of this committee will naturally become the section leaders and platform helpers at the school, carrying out the plans themselves have laid.

6. A free and strong platform. The platform must be free from political "pulls " and appointments to please, from ax-grinding business, from addresses that are run in because the speakers happen to be available, and from the dictation or control of the backing organization or any other outside power. If the teachers are to grow, their thoughts must have room to recrystallize in. The speakers must be strong in power to help. At least one should be an expert from outside the ordinary circle of Sunday school workers, who can bring in some new and formative line of experience and thought. Others should be such as can get near to the actual teachers and lift them to new effort.

7. Extensive advertising, supplemented by aggressive field-work during the whole year preceding the sessions. Many of the best students will be found and induced to come, or their schools induced to send them, only through the personal work of the field secretary or other friend of the cause. The advertising should be directed more to the Sunday schools and the pastors than to the teachers themselves, though these should be reached whenever possible.

8. A spirit of prayer and of reverence for the Word of God. Biblestudy should be a leading line of instruction, and the daily period of devotion should be planned for with special care. The school must stand for reverence, faith, and consecration, or the hopes of its founders will be vain.

BIBLICAL INSTRUCTION AT THE SUMMER ASSEMBLY

PROFESSOR HERBERT L. WILLETT, PH.D.

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

Among the instruments of public instruction lying beyond the limits of formal academic organization, none is proving more effective than the summer assembly. Within a comparatively brief period this movement has taken an important, apparently permanent, position in the list of educational forces. Its appeal is strong. To a people chiefly urban in character, and harried with the rush of city life, it offers the privilege of a retreat to nature, a return to simpler conditions of living, and at the same time the opportunity to pursue some forms of study which will afford intellectual refreshment and mental discipline.

In such a system of instruction the Bible has a legitimate and commanding position. It holds easily the chief place in literature. Its pages are a mine of precious things to be searched by seekers after hidden treasures. The Book of Job is the unapproached masterpiece among the world's greatest poems. The Book of Psalms contains the most perfect lyrics ever penned. The Proverbs are unmatched in perfection of form and depth of meaning, "jewels five words long, that on the stretched forefinger of all time sparkle forever." The stories of the Bible are more thrilling than the pages of romance. The oratory of Moses, Isaiah, Peter, and Paul, not to mention the Man of Nazareth, suffers in no degree by comparison with the classic utterances of ancient or modern days. And the lives here portrayed are those of the most outstanding men in history, a galaxy of stars that circle forever about the most radiant Life of the ages, the Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.

Such a book ought not to require any plea in its behalf to be admitted to an outstanding place in the programme of the summer assembly, which promises to be, in important respects, the popular university of the future. If education is to include, as all authorities are insisting to-day, the elements of ethical and religious discipline, certainly a means so admirable as the Bible must find instant welcome, and its neglect cannot longer be permitted in any adequate plan of study. It is the function of the instruments of education, among which the summer assembly is assuredly included, to provide those elements of instruction which are most required, the neglect of which would endanger the public welfare.

A renaissance of such study of the Scriptures is needed to-day. The apparatus is abundant. The materials are inexhaustible. The professions of interest are constant. All that is needed is that the work shall actually be done. The proofs that it is not being done to any such extent or with any such devotion as the reports of the Bible societies or the superficial indications of Bible-study organizations might at first give warrant for believing, are apparent upon closer inspection. Family worship with its accompanying use of the Scriptures is declining, if indeed that is not too mild a statement; Biblical instruction in the Sunday-schools, even if it approached the pedagogical standard of the public school, which it does not, could not supply in the brief periods of its prosecution the material required; the programme of public education excludes, or all but excludes, biblical studies from the curriculum; the natural desire to keep up with the literature of the day leaves scant time to the most interested reader of the Bible to pursue a line of study to which he is not compelled by inclination or professional responsibility.

The result of this condition is to be seen in a disheartening degree of ignorance respecting the Bible, on the part of young men and women fully equipped in other regards; in a certain traditional knowledge of the Bible possessed by many older people in the churches, unrefreshed, however, by recent study, and therefore the most likely to be jostled and perplexed by any utterances out of strict harmony with settled views; and in the wider circle of the community, such limited views of Biblical teaching as provide ground for mistaken beliefs regarding the Bible, for doubt and skepticism. Surely, there is urgent need of an actual and adequate acquaintance with the Scriptures, and upon no instrument of education does this responsibility fall more heavily than upon the summer assembly.

Among the classes of people for whom this provision ought to be made by the assembly, easily the first is the ministry. To an increasing number of pastors the Chautauqua idea offers the means of recreation combined with study. Biblical knowledge of greater or less degree may be assumed as the possession of every minister; but there are few who might not profit greatly by fresh and systematic study of the Scriptures, and it is a singular fact that those who are best acquainted with the Bible are the most eager to increase their mastery of its contents.

The assembly has brought assistance, also, to the Sunday school teachers. Many of them are aware of the contrast between the trained and skillful teaching in the day schools and that with which the Sunday

school must too largely content itself; and in response to this urgent need of improvement they are supplementing their Biblical knowledge by every means in their power. The least trained of them know that it is not isolated Biblical facts which are to be taught, but some comprehensive view of the Bible.

Still another class, sure to be largely represented in the personnel of a summer assembly, is the teacher in the public schools. On no group does a greater responsibility rest in this period of transition and crisis than on these instructors of youth. Secularism is demanding the elimination of all ethical and religious teaching in the schools. Christian sentiment and enlightened opinion are uniting in the view that such elimination is a peril too great to be faced without apprehension as to the outcome.

Time and space fail as one thinks of the college and seminary students, of the Christian workers in our own and another organization for social and religious service, of the parents who are slowly wakening to a sense of the urgent need of religious instruction in the home and are looking wistfully for assistance in its provision, and of the general public of the assembly, composed of all sorts and conditions of people, many of whom are quite indifferent to the Bible and the religious life, but all of whom are capable of some arousal and amendment. For all these the assembly needs to provide in its platform and its classrooms.

A word should be spoken regarding the teacher selected for biblical instruction in the assembly. He should not be one suggested by mere convenience, proximity, cheapness, or friendship. Too freequently one witnesses the spectacle of an assembly securing specialists for its other departments, but leaving the biblical study in charge of some unprepared and incompetent person, simply because he happens to be a preacher and can be secured with little or no expense. No economy is so wasteful, no saving so expensive, as that which grudges the employment of the most skilled and competent Bible teacher obtainable. Three qualities he should have in marked degree. He should know the Bible and biblical science as it has taken form in our day. He should understand the art of teaching, which is of equal importance. Most of all, he should embody in himself the ideals of the Bible, as one in whom the Word has again become flesh; for only those who have the mind of Christ can interpret the things of Christ. Thus equipped, the teacher will prove himself a workman that needeth, not to be ashamed, handling aright the Word of truth.

Of the method of Biblical study no extended outline is required. If