earlier committed to the care of nurses, governesses, teachers, and that all four of these evils have grown steadily for at least two generations, while among the children of the more prolific lower classes crime, as measured by the age of first committment, is every decade more precocious, both in city and country, and also that the growing diffusion of schoollearning does not bring proportionate immunity from either vice or crime, although it does give greater ability to conceal both. Other studies, nearly half a score in number, made in various parts of the country and on various classes, show a rapidly progressive ignorance of the Bible, despite home, church, and Sunday school, so that for an increasing percentage of our high-school pupils its best passages and most salient incidents are so unknown that the commonest literary allusions to its contents are not understood. Ancient German and Greek religions are often better known. The problems are too vast and vital to be solved by any quick devices, by resolutions, committees, or addresses. In view of the magnitude of the danger, I feel profoundly that my, or perhaps any one's, program of how to meet it will seem either radical or impractical, or both; but I could not be an optimist if I did not believe myself in its soundness and efficiency.

I. First of all, I would have worked out two concrete courses in morals, one for high school and one for early college classes,-detailed and practical, rather than abstract and theoretical. This work should begin in personal hygiene and regimen, and comprise diet, exercise, body keeping and training, and should enlist the strong and legitimate passion of every young man to be strong and every girl to be beautiful and attractive. It should include dress, adornment, etiquette, and manners; should treat the seven deadly sins of the Catholic Church, pride, avarice, luxury, envy, anger, appetite, sloth,— and the cardinal virtues, wisdom, courage, temperance, justice, faith, hope, and love,- should involve something of temperament, habit, character, livelihood, citizenship, example, self-respect and control, selfishness and honesty, patriotism, companionship and friendship, obedience, usefulness, fun, ambition, methods of study, duties to self and to relations and acquaintances, to state and church, and should culminate in a few wholesome principles concerning purity, marriage, home-making, fatherhood and motherhood, and duties to the unborn. These latter topics should be taught in a condensed way by hints, and without causing self-consciousness. All should be copiously illustrated by examples drawn from history, literature, and life, and while I would not have the religious motives omitted, the chief appeal should be to prudence of a common-sense kind, and to the

sentiment of honor, meant to be the chief advocate of the interests of the race in the soul of the individual. We still lack a manual or curriculum of this kind, but experience has proven the practicability of it, and it is sure to come.

II. For some children the mother is literally in the place of God, and all the sentiments that underlie both virtue and religion — viz., helplessness, dependence, reverence, devotion, loyalty, gratitude, love, service - must in the child first be directed to her, and only later are they transferred to deity, nature, and society. Every failure on her part to supply food, care, love, authority, or to evoke any of the sentiments involves defect in the child's moral and religious nature. Hence the mother who does most for herself does most for her child. So subtle is this early rapport that nothing in her soul or body fails to register its effect on the body and soul of the infant, who knows no other god but its mother. For her, therefore, religious and moral nurture means not only to crave motherhood for her own good, but to want the whole of it, pain, joy, and all. The more we know of early childhood, the clearer we see that it is what motherhood makes it; that motherhood is therefore the most creative and divine thing in the world. Formal instruction avails little without this work of preformation to prepare the soil. Every kind and degree of maternal ministration of this kind increases receptivity for teaching when its time comes.

III. Formal moral and religious instruction at home should, of course, begin with stories, very simple, brief, and oft-repeated at first, and rapidly increasing in number, kind, and complexity, as the child's intelligence expands. Stories are the oldest form of transmitted culture and the most formative. All should have a moral more and more disguised and implicit as the child advances in years, but the moral should be ever present for sentiments, will, or both. I suspect and challenge the word " formal" in my topic if it involves, as it does with too many pedagogues, anything methodic. It should at first be as free as possible from every element of didacticism, systematic sequence, or the drill factors of the precisian. Form should be utterly subordinated to content, and the tales should be of the greatest possible number and variety. Young children need elemental story-roots picturing all the elemental good and evil in the world;-all these, of which the kindergarten has a very precious kit, though far too few, too elaborated and selected from too narrow a range, the child needs, and for these its moral appetite is voracious. Every mother should be a story-teller, and her repertory should be large, well-chosen, and ever replenished, and the father should take his turn. What else was the twilight hour,

the fireplace, where that still survives, made for? Tales are the natural soul-food of children, their native breath and vital air; but our children are too often either story-starved or charged with ill-chosen or ill-adapted twaddle tales. Good tales, well told, preform the moral choices of adult life aright. Many Bible stories are among the best, but these are not enough, and there are not enough adapted to any age, so we should go outside, and draw on other sources. Here our need is a canon of well-chosen ones from a very wide field, cast into the right form for each age.

IV. The religion of nature should not be omitted in the home. Everything has been worshiped by primitive man, and here, too, the child tends to repeat the history of the race. Moon, sun, stars, the boundless sky and its great void, wind, stars, lightning, wind, cloud, shadow, sea, mountains, fire, trees, flowers, animals, and, lastly, man himself, the crown and epitome of all,- all these have been supreme objects of worship somewhere and at some time, and the vestiges of these old nature-religions are many and potent in the childish heart and soul, and all need some development, for how shall the soul adore the unseen till it has first felt the power of the visible things that declare the glory of God? What kind of a father is he who has never taken his children on a walk in the country, where they could be at least exposed to these influences? What more hallowed way of spending Sunday afternoon in every season? And in what environment does parenthood stand forth in more dignity and majesty than on such a background of nature, the mighty parent of us all?

V. As to prayers at the mother knee, in the family, grace at table, Bible reading and memorizing, these are just as precious home influences as they ever were, or perhaps as any one has ever claimed them to be; but they are all rapidly declining, even in Christian homes. They ought to be maintained for their influence on the children, even if there were no other reason. This aspect of the decadence of the home is to me peculiarly pathetic. Must this daily consecration of the household to heaven lapse to a mere vanishing remainder? Is a psychologist or pedagogue old-fashioned to plead for these, when even the clergy say so little for it? Many can at least have sacred songs and hymns in the home on fit occasions, and these sink deep and bear rich. fruitage later.

VI. If formal instruction means catechism of either the Westminster or more modern and trivialized form, I cannot plead for it, if for no other reason than that there are better uses of the scanty time, and dogma is everywhere giving way to life. Moral and religious training

for children is, in the home, essentially informal, and non-examinable. It is seed cast on the waters, which will never again be seen as seed, but only as the harvest of later years.

Finally, and above all, instruction is the atmosphere of the home. The child's intellect is very small and feeble, but there is nothing in the domestic environment to which its soul is not responsive. Every cloud in the heaven of the parents' love for each other, every moment of suspicion, every word of censure, every act of indifference, wilts the child's moral nature. The home must be first, and not second to business or to society. It must be happy, for young souls expand and grow only where quiet joy reigns. It must be pervaded by a high sense of duty, which is best imparted, not by conscious and methodic inculcations, but by the infection of example. There must be high ideals and standards in all matters, order, system, regularity, and therefore there must be discipline and no overindulgence. The rod must not be absolutely impossible, but the requirements must not be fitful or changeable.

Happily, we live in a day of rapidly increasing knowledge of children, and the more we know of them, the more they are desired, and the more clearly it is seen that their bodies and souls are worthier than anything else in the world of love, reverence, and service, and that nothing supplies parents with such potent motives to become and to do the best they can as the desire to be the better able to bring their children to the fullest possible maturity of all their powers.

IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL

REV. EVERETT D. BURR, D.D.

PASTOR FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH, NEWTON CENTER, MASSACHUSETTS

When God gave the Bible to mankind he had thought of the kind of man to whom He gave it. Its adaptation to human need is like the light which adjusts itself to the eye of the minutest insect and the extended vision of man. This adaptability of the Scripture is not limited. to the varied needs of humanity in the large, but to the changing needs of the individual life in its varied developmental periods.

Paul knew one life at least that from his point of view illustrated what the Scripture could do in the culture of the soul. Of Timothy he said," From a child thou hast known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through the faith which is in Christ Jesus. All Scripture, God-breathed, is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the

man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works." From childhood to manhood, from the early years of immaturity to the perfecting of character, the Scripture can be both instructor and curriculum.

In methods of secular education the child is no longer a problem, but an opportunity. Time was when the child was thought to be a volume to be read, a riddle to be solved, a block to be chiseled into form: but now we are abandoning the artificial methods and are dealing with soul life as the scientific horticulturist would deal with the plant, by a method in harmony with nature, which recognizes the four seasons, and dares allow that this new expression of the life of God, a child, shall not be forced to fit a man's idea of what he should be, but rather fulfill the divine intention. The new education understands its first duty to be to free a soul from physical limitations; to open a child's eyes and teach him to see, to unstop the ears and bid him to hear, to guide the untrained muscles in their first adventures — in a word, to set free the entempled soul in self-expression.

The modern teacher does not seek to instruct, but to educate, not to inform the child, but to form a new life in the child, not to leave a thought, but to find one, not to project himself upon the pupil, but to enable the pupil to project himself as a new force into the world.

One cannot define the ultimate aims of the true education without discovering that they are coincident with the sublime purposes of Christian religion. Education is the emancipation of soul.

The salvation of the soul, as implied by the traditional teaching of the Church, is something independent of time, something which can be accomplished in a day. But this implies that religion is only a medicine to cure a disease. The great Teacher defined the salvation which He came to give in terms of life. In His view, religion is a diet to nourish the spirit.

The method of soul-saving is conversion. The method of soulculture is education. The former seeks excitement; the latter, deliberation. The former has a definite end in view, and when the end is reached, is satisfied; its task is finished and the evangelist is triumphant. The latter has no end in view; the work is never finished, the process is endless. In the former method, formal instruction prevails, of necessity; in the latter, vital processes must have sway.

In the light of the new education the older religious conception of conversion of soul and the modern conception of culture of soul meet and mingle. They are not contradictory and mutually exclusive; they are interpenetrating and complemental.