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and efficient helpers, and received for themselves intellectual stimulus. The topic of study for the current year is "Great Christian Truths," the lessons being prepared by Edward Judson, D. D., with "Suggestions for Collateral Study" by Spencer B. Meeser, D. D. It is gratifying to know that six thousand of the pamphlets containing instalments of these lessons are being sent out monthly. Lessons on the same topics in simplified forms are issued for juniors.

This represents a kind of work which may be pursued in the churches at large. While this great organization, the Religious Education Association, is bringing forth and proclaiming its lofty ideals, formulating its comprehensive plans, and seeking to co-ordinate the agencies for religious education, there are some practical forms in which the work of education may be carried on now in our churches. We can inauguarate

I. A New Method of Bible Study

There are multitudes of people in our churches whose treatment of the Bible is strangely out of harmony with their professions concerning it. They profess to regard it as the authoritative and supreme revelation of God; yet they are content with a fragmentary and superficial knowledge of it, which they would be ashamed to confess in regard to any text-book that they need in the school. The progress of historical criticism has made it possible for us to read and interpret the book along these lines to an extent and with a certainty never before possible. In the light of historical criticism the messages of the old prophets stand out with new significance; we have a new vision of the historical Christ and of the meaning of his teachings and of those of the Apostles; we can read the book with new discrimination as to its values. Here is a door of opportunity through which, surely, a pastor should seek to lead his people as many as will, and especially the young. Such a culture course would quicken new interest in Bible study; it would invest the old book with a new charm; it would furnish a broader base for religious experience and put underneath faith a deeper, stronger foundation; it would meet the scientific temper and intellectual demands of our times; it would be in harmony with the methods to which our young people are accustomed in the schools, but which they so often miss in the church, and might thus help to check the tendency to alienation from the church. There is need of

2. A Course in Christian Ethics

Religion aims at right living. It is more than creed; it is more than a ritual; it is more than a rapture; it is more than a round of activities.

It is essentially a life. Christian truth is not a tinted but vaporous cloud to be gazed at and speculated about as an apocalypse in the air; it is an inspiration that expresses itself in right living and impels to honorable conduct in all life's relations.

The trend of thought in our time is distinctly towards the more ethical conception of Christianity. Less value is attached to emotional frames of mind or to dogmatic statements of belief, and more to righteousness in life.

Here, again, is a wide field and an open door of opportunity. The true ethical life has been defined as "the fulfillment of all personal relations." These relations are not only manifold, but also in many cases delicate and perplexing, calling for keen discernment and discrimination. There is need of clearness of vision, sanity of judgment, strength of principle, sensitiveness of conscience, and, above all, of supreme loyalty to God. The pastor who leads his people—as many as will, and especially the young-in an orderly and comprehensive way, to e clear vision of their personal relations and duties, and to an application of Christian principles to those relations, is performing an invaluable service, which will bear fruit in attainment in "the pure art of living." There is room and need, also, of

3. A Course of Training in Forms and Methods of Christian Work There are multitudes of people in the churches who would willingly engage in some form of active, beneficent ministry-and this is especially true of our young people-if they only knew what, and where, and how. They listen to exhortations to service; the feeling and the will are stirred by the appeal; they are ready to engage in active service; but in the absence of definite statement they do not know how to act intelligently. They need to be taught the breadth and manysidedness of Christian work; the religious value of any really useful work, special forms of service in the church and in the community which offer scope for religious activity, with wise methods for the expression of activity.

No pastor who seeks to secure an all-round religious culture for his people will fail to provide some method for

4. A Study of Missions

This will broaden the horizon, enlarge the sympathies, bring into closer fellowship with the thought and purpose and mission of Christ, and lead to a new interest in and a new interpretation of current events and world-movements, as being related to the progress of the kingdom of God upon earth.

But I can not further particularize. I have indicated simply some of the lines along which it is quite practicable for the pastor to lead his people, and in so doing to contribute to the development of Christian character and efficiency. Difficulties will, of course, suggest themselves, but none that are insurmountable. Not all pastors, indeed, are qualified, either temperamentally or mentally, for the specific work of teaching; but in many who seem to possess no special aptitude there is latent faculty that might be developed by doing. Where pastors lack the gift, the services of others may often be enlisted. It may be said that the time and strength of busy pastors are already overtaxed with multitudinous duties and cares. A revision of plans of work may be necessary, and some things of lesser moment and value be set aside in order that the larger claims of religious culture may be met. It may be said further, that comparatively few of the people will enter upon any such courses as have been outlined. Granting that, the investment of time and strength and personality in the training of the few may in the long run yield larger returns in the kingdom than any other that can be made.

DISCUSSION

REV. EDWARD CUMMINGS

PASTOR SOUTH CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH (UNITARIAN) OF BOSTON CAMBRIDGE,

MASSACHUSETTS

What is needed more than anything else is the kind of instruction which teaches us to write History with a large H and Nature with a large N. Write your history that way, and immediately the unhappy distinction between sacred history and profane history, between things sacred and things secular, disappears - just as the unhappy conflict between religion and science vanishes when we learn to write Nature with a large N. There is no reason why this proposition should seem strange or new to you. There is plenty of good precedent for it. Why is it that this story of Jewish life and thought is called the Bible, the Book of books? Why is it that for thousands of years, generation after generation has found strength and comfort and inspiration in these naïve records? It is simply because the writers wrote their history and their stories and their poems with the large H. It was God's story which they recorded; it was the story of the way in which God had created the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that in them is: of the way in which He had revealed his laws of life and prosperity to great patriots and leaders, like Abraham, Isaac, and Moses. This Bible owes its perennial power largely to the fact that in it History is

written with a large H and Nature with a large N. There is absolutely no precedent in the Old Testament for our modern habit of distinguishing between religious truth and scientific truth.

Think of the inspiration which would come to us and our children if the writers of history and the teachers of history realized that our history is just as sacred as ever Jewish history was; that our people are a chosen people as truly as ever the Hebrews were. Think what an inspiration it would be, if we should gather our children about us and repeat to them the sacred history of our own beloved country — the true and miraculous story of how God brought our Pilgrim Fathers and Puritan ancestors out of the house of bondage and the land of Egypt. How God brought our pious forefathers, with their wives and little ones, safely across wintry seas more formidable than any Red Sea. How God led our fathers and mothers in their wanderings in the vast unexplored wilderness of this new world. How He delivered them from pestilence, and famine, and sword, from savage beasts, and still more savage men. How He made of this little handful of chosen people a great nation. How He gave them leaders, statesmen, prophets and teachers, inventors and discoverers, like Washington, Franklin, Lincoln, Agassiz, Emerson, who were greater than the patriarchs of old, and saw God more clearly than Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, or Luther, or Calvin could see Him. How God has punished us and our forefathers for the sin of slavery, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. How He has taught us and our fathers in the name of trade, commerce, factory legislation, conflicts of labor and capital, the impossibility of successful self-seeking, and the absolute necessity of seeking first the welfare of God's kingdom of the social family. Most inspiring of all, how God, after sifting the nations of the earth to get this nation, has intrusted this chosen people with the lofty mission of making the family kingdom of democracy come on earth as it is in heaven.

This is the inspiring history which I would I might engrave upon the heart and mind of every boy and girl, every man and woman in this beloved country. It is this story, His story, God's story, and not the mere dates and details and raw materials of history, that every child in our public schools ought to learn by heart. It is His story, and not mere history, that the historian should write and the teachers and professors in colleges and universities should teach. If the schools do not teach this, then is their teaching vain. If the universities do not. teach this, then is their wisdom foolishness and their light darkness. If education does not center about this, then it is but a blind leader of the blind.

But when we have leared to write Nature with a large N, and History with a large H, we shall find the real beauty and inspiration of life in this reunion of science and religion, of sacred and secular. Then education will teach us how the world is God's world. Then astronomy and the music of the spheres will tell of the glory and grandeur and rationality of it. Then psychology will teach us how to will and do God's infinitely rational and good pleasure.

REV. JOHN R. GOW

PASTOR PERKINS STREET BAPTIST CHURCH, SOMERVILLE, MASSACHUSETTS

I can offer but a single suggestion toward this discussion. Perhaps it will be best stated in the familiar words with which the writer of the Fourth Gospel declares his purpose in writing the Gospel: "That ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that, believing, ye may have life in His name." For me, the educational aims of the Church are summed in the word "life"; that life is to be reached through believing; and that believing is nothing short of surrender in full to what is conceived to be the supreme disclosure of the Divine Presence in the forms of humanity. The vision of an ideal social order under the name of the Kingdom, the setting forth of the principles controlling spiritual existence in time and in eternity, all the truths discovered, revealed, and articulated, by which the thought of man is brought into harmony with the great realities, and even the exhibition of the highest human personalities as embodiments of the Divine Personality, are in the New Testament only means to an end. Whatever the subject-matter of its teaching may be, its aim is life for the believer.

Pre-eminently do the conditions which surround the educational work of the church at the present time demand that this aim of "life by faith" be kept clearly and steadfastly in view. The Church is, perforce, sharing its honored positions as teacher with many other institutions seeking human welfare. Even her specialty of fostering the religious life has been successfully invaded. The temper of the common-thinking denies her exclusive claims. Neither cloistered nor scholastic instruction falls on very attentive ears. The men in the stirring arenas of the modern world have neither time nor patience for what does not plainly concern the struggle for life. Make it eviIdent that the Church has found the motives to the noblest and successful living, and that her servants and teachers know how to bring these motives to bear on the average man so as to put life into him, and the modern man is ready to respond.

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