I have thought that as teachers we have lost power by neglecting the Master's method. Our Fathers in all the churches feared lest they humbled the spiritual in making it seem natural. So they harked away to history and to difficult philosophizing, to schoolmen's subtleties of logic and casuistry, gathering illustrations from what the masses do not and cannot know; obtaining much repute for learning and profundity; preaching to the twentieth man while the nineteen slept, "enduring hardness" with a patience they thought to be a means of grace. A proof of the divinity of Christianity is that it has survived. some of the teaching of its modern teachers.

Further, the condition of our modern life take the priest of the family from his home before the children wake; mothers in such families have as little time for being a Lois or a Eunice as the fathers have for being family priests. So much of that sweet and noble religious work of father and mother which some of us recall a half-century and more ago has ceased; has been put into the hands of the secular and the Sunday school teacher, who is often without knowledge of life, and sometimes without religious depth or experience. Yet I must believe that the cases of gross ignorance of Christian history and doctrine in well-grown boys and college students are chiefly from those homes that are not Christian in any other sense than that they exist in a Christian community.

That the moral bond which holds society together must be forged by some stronger force than convenience or natural ethics, I fully believe. "Thou God seest me " is a nobler restraint than " My neighbor or the police will see me." The man who is really good is the one whose heart is toward good because of his obligation to the Good One, God. This obligation does not vary. It does not yield to weakness -to business trickery, to the example of others. It would not vary if the state passed from individualism to socialism. It is as firm in the night as in the day, as lofty alone as in the multitude. This obligation cannot be truly perceived or be effectively binding without the "washing of regeneration." To the soul thus changed, the ethical is the important, the all-important.

THE CHURCH AS AN EDUCATOR

REV. ALBERT W. HITCHCOCK

PASTOR CENTRAL CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, WORCESTER, MASSACHUSETTS

After the father of the family, the priest was the first teacher of mankind. Every great religion has been an educator of the people. A thousand years before our era, the Parashade for training Brahman

youth were scattered over India. Excavation in the Euphrates valley reveals the Babylonian libraries annexed to their temples. Buddha was called the " Teacher," and his temples are still the only schools for multitudes. The mosque has been for centuries the college and the library of Islam, and Mohammedan scholars once preserved for us the learning of the East, through a crisis in the Christian Church. The Hebrews made education a religious duty, and religion the climax of education. Jesus Christ was pre-eminently a teacher. He gathered his school of twelve about him, and with his last commandment sent them forth to teach all nations in His name. That commission they delivered to all who came after them. Not only has the Church maintained her own inner culture, but by force of her truest genius she has made the cause of general intelligence her charge out of a deep necessity.

A recognized order of teachers appeared in the earliest of the churches. Within a century catechetical schools grew up to fit applicants for membership in the Church. Schools of more elaborate culture developed from these training classes, as at Alexandria, to prepare teachers and preachers for the rapidly extending propaganda. A religion with a book was of necessity an educational force wherever it went.

For centuries, whatever of education Europe offered was administered by the Church. Ulfilas, Martin of Tours, Nestorius, and Patrick stand among the earliest champions of education. From the council of Constantinople in 680, when it was decreed that bishops and priests everywhere should provide schools free of cost for the poor, and at proper charges for those better endowed, education was the acknowledged duty of the Church, although these decrees were expressions of an ideal rather than the assurance of actual facts.

Charlemagne provided public schools, grammar schools, and seminaries, and required that these be sustained by cathedral and monastery. He gathered about him wise men like Alcuin of York and Ansgar, and scores of others caught the contagion of high resolve and devotion. The torch was handed from man to man across the Continent and down the centuries. The cathedrals and monasteries were the solitary seats of culture until the universities and the New Learning appeared, and these also found a welcome and their early nurture in the Church. All the professions were wholly in the hands of the clergy until the sixteenth century. The first layman to be seated in a professor's chair at any university won the right in 1482, after a severe struggle. Indeed, the formative purpose of the European uni

versities was the same that gave birth to our American colleges,-provision for an educated clergy.

What the Renaissance began the Reformation carried out, and education broadened in its purpose to provide for all who cared to study. The note of universality was given to the universities. Wherever the Reformed faith prevailed, sciences were freely studied and a broader range was given to thought. If direct control by the clergy was less evident, the spirit of the Church still ruled in the centers of learning under patronage of the state or of laymen, as truly as where the hierarchy dominated classroom and faculty.

Under the impulse of a counter-reformation, the Jesuits organized a teaching body, the like of which the world has never seen, and for a century controlled the education of Roman Catholics, and largely also of Protestant youth. The Bible appeared in the tongue of the common people, and free learning always follows the Bible among the people. Popular education became as much the duty of the Protestant churches as preaching or worship. If the care of the school and university was handed over to the state, so was the care of religion, in Germany and England, in Holland and the northern countries. But it was done with the understanding that the State was Christian, and would safeguard the interests of the Church in school and congregation alike.

In our own country, Massachusetts Bay Colony had hardly established itself before those wise, foreseeing Puritans planned their common schools. The pastors were their first teachers, and when John Harvard endowed the college lest there should arise an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present minister shall lie in the dust," the entire Church spoke through him. It has been speaking ever since, through Yale, Bowdoin, Trinity, Wesleyan, Amherst, and Williams, and Dartmouth, every one of them the product of its spirit and selfsacrificing bounty; through Oberlin and Marietta, Beloit and Grinnell, Fargo and Drury, Colorado Springs, and the Christian colleges of the western slope. What power has cared for negro education at Fiske and Hampton, Atlanta and Tuskegee, Howard and Tougaloo, and Straight? The Indian has been uplifted, not by the government agent, but by the Christian teacher. Surely, the Church is still the educator of the nation. This educational impulse is deep and strong in Christianity. It is a part of its very life.

Dealing with religious natures, the Church has carried on an inner training of emotion, intellect, and will through her ritual and preaching. The forms of her worship that were gradually wrought out, sensuous,

mystical, appealing, had their reason in their educational value. Worship became a school for the emotions and a stimulus to the imagination. When it ended there, this partial training gave an arrested development that left its pupils children still. When the pulpit has been silent, men have fallen away from the Church, and its influence has waned. Preaching has an intimate and essential part to play in the instruction of the Church. The great preachers have been teachers of the people, from St. Paul to Phillips Brooks.

It is too late now to insist upon the duty of parents to teach their own children in religious things. Not all children have religious parents. Christian people have become so accustomed to assign the function of teaching to others, that they are too ignorant and unwilling to attempt the task. It is safer to hand the average child over to such teachers as the Church can muster, than to leave him to the indifference and neglect of his home. To ask the state to do this work of religious education is to ask the impossible at present. For many years to come, this essential part of education must be administered by the Church outside the schools, as a sacred trust imposed upon it by the state. Religious teaching we must have, and at least upon a par with that given to our children in other branches of culture. Our equipment for it, desultory and incomplete, should be made as excellent as that provided by the state. We are the state, and we are not doing all of our duty if we fail to provide the best facilities for the religious education. of our children.

Much has been done to meet the demand for better religious instruction. I have recently made investigation of present conditions throughout the Northern states. Out of 1,200 inquiries equally divided among Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, and Presbyterians, it is significant that responses came from one-half. 190 Congregational, 150 Presbyterian, 123 Methodist, and 121 Baptist answers were of use. In reply to the first question, "In preaching, do you seek definitely to teach, or rather to inspire?" The usual answer was "Both," but the emphasis was clearly placed upon teaching. I learned that 63 per cent. of the Baptists sending data, 55 per cent of the Congregationalists, 51 per cent of the Methodists, and 52 per cent of the Presbyterians teach regular classes in Sunday school, while enough more serve as substitute teachers to increase the ratio to 70 per cent for the first, and 60 per cent for the other three denominations. Of them all, only 21 teach in junior or primary grades. The International Lessons are in use by 68 per cent of Baptists, 49 per cent of Congregationalists, 80 per cent of Methodists, and 67 per cent of Presbyterians who sent in replies.

Pastor's classes outside of Sunday School are reported by 35 per cent. of Baptists, 63 per cent. of Congregationalists, 25 per cent. of Methodists, and 30 per cent. of Presbyterians; but very few of the Baptist classes are the catechumen classes covered in the question. Congregationalists report 47 original courses and many published lessons and catechisms. Three Baptists, 42 Congregationalists, 31 Methodists, and 50 Presbyterians use catechisms, but the last two sects teach them in Sunday school, and Congregationalists generally make the catechism an outline rather than a task for the memory. Fifteen different catechisms are named.

A large number of pastors engage in various sorts of teaching outside of Sunday school and the catechumen's class. Some make the midweek service their opportunity, others employ the young people's meeting for teaching, fewer hold teachers' meetings, more than twice as many hold week-day Bible classes, and 26 report mission study classes, equally divided between Congregationalists and all the rest. New Testament Greek, literature, music, philosophy, history, and sociology are also taught. While few report thoroughgoing plans for a distinctly educational ministry, the influence of so much teaching and of the definite intention to make their preaching educational rather than simply inspirational must be of value in strengthening the influence of the Church in the community.

CULTURE COURSES IN CHURCHES

REV. E. E. CHIVERS, D.D.

FIELD SECRETARY AMERICAN BAPTIST HOME MISSIONARY SOCIETY, NEW YORK CITY

About twelve years ago the Baptist Young People's Union of America inaugurated a comprehensive series of Biblical and missionary studies, in four-year periods, for the young people of that denomination. The Biblical studies, in thirty lessons a year, treated such topics as "Preparations for the Messiah," "The Life and Teachings of Jesus," "The Labors and Letters of the Apostles," "Struggles for Distinctive Principles," "Doctrines of our Faith," "The Christian Life." These studies were prepared by men of recognized scholarship, and were taken by thousands of young people-by many, it is true, in a very superficial way, by others with earnest purpose. The benefit of these studies to multitudes of young people, and to the churches of which they were members, is beyond question. To many they came as a revelation, broadening the horizon, giving men vision of the one increasing purpose of divine salvation, confirming faith, enriching experience, and stimulating to intelligent service. Pastors found men