agree with me that there is not in it all a single thing that any citizen of the United States, or any judge or jury or set of lawmakers, could put under the ban, or would care to, as being "religious " teaching.

The problem of teaching religion in the schools without doctrine and dogma would be easy enough, some of you are saying to yourselves, and a very indefinite, unreal thing might be clear, if only we knew what is meant by "religion," "the spiritual life," and such terms. I must insist that, for the most part, they must remain indefinite. It is the ever-recurring temptation, bred of inertia, to split up and dissect and define and classify the things that belong primarily to our appreciation or spiritual apprehension that has got religion into most of its troubles. We know some things with our hearts better than we can ever know them with our minds, and the verities of religion belong under this head. I do not know why I love my friend, nor how, nor exactly what I got out of the Fifth Symphony or the Sistine Madonna, but I am not ashamed to go on drawing life from them in spite of the failure of my reason to analyze them. It is time religion should be as direct and simple and fearless as is art.

There are, however, a few specific characteristics of religion that we can agree upon, and that the schools may well cultivate, by way of preparing the soil and sowing the seeds of the spiritual life.

(a) In the first place, there is the power to enter feelingly into some thought-interest or into some occupation. Arnold's definition, "Religion is morality touched with emotion," is doubtless very faulty, but it is among the best of the angular snap-shots of the actual religious life of those who stand historically as the great spiritual leaders; and a paraphrase of it, by slipping in the word "education" instead of religion," would be a good characterization of the ideals of the great educational reformers. In all the list of studies and occupations in the school, there are only the two bare exceptions-writing and spelling -in which I cannot recall some teacher or teachers who aroused such a happy, heartful response as to give them spiritual significance.

(b) A second element of religion and of good training is the habit of responsiveness. To respond to the tasks that are set, to the teacher's wish, and to the facts that lie about, is the condition of a good student; to respond to persons and institutions and social forces is a primary requisite of morality, just as social and civic callousness is the primary root of evil and vice; responsiveness to the thoughts and sentiments of persons and books, including the Bible, to personal ideals, to instinctive promptings, and to unseen relations, is one of the primary sources of religion; and responsiveness is a habit that can be cultivated. Through

variety in its exercise, the habit may pass over into a mood. The teacher herself can widen the spirit involved in any habit or idea until it passes over into related habits and ideas, and becomes finally a persistent attitude. Here we have the responsibility falling back upon the teacher again as to whether the manifold habits of responsiveness, for the varied exercise of which the school is so full, shall break over in the highest reaches of religion.

(c) A third element is to respond with a whole heart. This is one of the differential marks of religion. It takes in the entire personality. Religion is the response of the whole life to its fullest sense of reality. This attitude can be cultivated in the schools. In so far as there is good teaching, it will be. Our schools, with their choppiness and mechanization, are instilling spot knowledge. They are fixing the habit of responding to little things in a little way, instead of responding to little things (if there are any) in a great way, or to great things with a whole life.

(d) A most hopeful prophecy of better things in religious education in the secular schools is a general depreciation, among psychologists and educators, of intellectualism, a heightened sense of the value of conduct, character, and social refinements, as ends of culture, and especially a regard for what might be called intellectual tastes, as opposed to intellectual mechanics. The excessive analysis and dissecting and hair-splitting and logic chopping, into which our school life has tended to degenerate, defeats the ends of "intellectual " training itself, and of "scientific " procedure.

If intellectualism defeats the ends of science, it also defeats religion. The disease of religion to-day, if it has one big disease, is that it has been over-intellectualized. Our theories about God, our beliefs formulated in creeds and doctrines, give us pilules of religious truth, but not exalted ideals and a warm sense of reality.

(e) An essential condition in all learning and also in religion is the truth-seeking and truth-loving spirit. It is this spirit, together with an assurance that the truth outside will become one's own, that is the condition back of religious, scientific, or æsthetic insight and achievement. It is this which gave Bunyan, Tolstoi, Fox and Wesley their hold upon spiritual verities; it is this by which Helen Hunt Jackson, after months of striving, found the plot of Ramona; by which Sir Rowan Hamilton discovered as by a flash the quaternions; it is this attitude that Professor Huxley is describing when he confesses that he came to give himself up to the leading of facts in a way which is best described by the Christian doctrine of the surrender of the self to God. There is no

study in the school which cannot be used to cultivate the longing for and delight in the thing which lies just next. With little children the thing just beyond will be a little thing; but as life widens and deepens, the pleasure and delight should ripen into a hunger and thirst, and the fact and deed should be enriched until they blossom into righteous

ness.

() Nor must the truth be my truth simply. A decentralization of the individual-the appreciation of his life and his truth as part of a larger life and truth-are essential both in education and in religion. It is undoubtedly the message of most religions to give the individual a vivid sense of his relation to an Eternal Reality and to other persons. This is also the keynote to the most general educational doctrine of the present time, viz., the social end of school life, rather than the cultural or utilitarian. The way of approach to this decentralization is in the cultivation and right use of the imagination, by which the person can transcend his own narrow limitations and make real in thought and feeling the world of people and things outside.

This analysis of the common elements of education and religion does not mean to be exhaustive. It is complete enough, however, to suggest that for the occupations and studies of the school to blossom into religion should be as natural as for a healthy tree to bear fruit.

4. The last point to consider in spiritualizing the secular schools concerns itself with our understanding of the nature of children. We are being taught nowadays that religion gets its content from the sum of the instinctive endowments with which the individual is supplied by nature; that the personal life is a spring in which there well up the brute and the human instincts, the sum of which and the particular blending of which give tone and coloring and quality and motive and content to the whole life, and determine personality and character. The highest function of a teacher is to take this little germ of possibility, a little child, and play upon its complex of instinctive endowments, and bring out of them a beautiful harmony. A few instincts will have to be repressed, over-shadowed, or even uprooted; some need stimulating, while others need bringing up on to the highest levels of refinement.

In so far as a dignified sense of God and a reverent appreciation of life shall prevail, and to the extent that we can have men and women in the teaching profession who have come into their own spiritual heritage, the common school will become a life-giving and religiondeveloping institution. Just to that extent will the quibbling over "religion" in the schools be a thing of the past.

SARAH LOUISE ARNOLD

DEAN OF SIMMONS COLLEGE, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

We shall find the best and most natural illustrations of these truths already stated in the lives of the children we know best. I shall therefore call your attention to a few incidents of child life, which will serve as my text.

I have in mind a four-year-old girl, favored in many things, but especially happy in that she spends her summers on an island in a beautiful lake, mountain-rimmed. She has always been privileged to walk with her father and mother in the fields and woods; to "go a-trudging," as she called it, has been her chief delight. Where did the trees get their red and yellow leaves ?" she asked. "Who made them red and yellow?" Her question answered, she ran to her mother with her chubby hands filled with her new treasures, saying, "See, Mamma! I have brought you some of God's beautiful leaves!"

"How came the island here?" she asked. "Who brought the rocks and the trees?" She was told how the island was lifted into its place; how the soil was formed, the trees planted, and the island made ready for the birds, for the trees, for the rabbits, for the squirrels, and for her, just as her father had built the house for her, in which she lived. As the time for her return to her home approached, she sat one evening watching the sunset and the early evening stars, and said "Don't you hope that God will be at home when we get there, just as He has been here this summer?" So linked with her love of the beautiful in the world was her reverent thought of Him who had made it beautiful.

Another child whom I knew-a country girl-received as a gift a copy of Emerson's Parnassus. When the dishes had been washed after supper, she went, with her precious book, out into the hay-field and read and reread the poems she liked best. Among them was Bryant's "Lines to a Waterfowl." She is a woman grown, but she says that the childhood experience is still fresh in her memory, and with the lines there ever recurs to her thought the clear summer evening, the fragrance of the new-mown hay, the crimson sunset, and the dark figure of the distant bird, which her eye beheld as she read:

"Whither midst falling dew,

While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,
Far through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue

Thy solitary way?

He who from zone to zone,

Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,

In the long way that I must tread alone,

Will guide my steps aright."

And here the teaching must begin. The twenty-third Psalm brings to you and me its assurance of comfort and peace. How? "He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters." We knew in childhood the green pastures and still waters; the tenderness of father and mother and friend interpreted for us the loving Shepherd.

The elements of religious education are two, the teaching of nature in childhood, and the living example of God's children-so that we know Him through the life of our friends. Both these elements should be contributed by the home. But the best of homes can be re-inforced, and the poorer ones must be aided by the teachings of the school. The best result of wisely directed nature-study is that it leads to a fuller interpretation of the teachings of the Master, and develops a reverent spirit. The next step is the study of literature, the literature of the spirit, in which nature is interpreted to us as speaking for the Father. But neither teaching avails unless the teacher herself dwell "in the secret place of the Most High." A friend tells me that one of her earliest childhood memories is of being awakened by her mother before daybreak on a June morning. "Come, child," she said,-" come with me over to the pines, to hear the thrushes sing." Across the dewwet meadows they went, in the early flush of morning, and the child, her hand clasped in her mother's, listened with her to the exquisite music of the thrush in the holy hour and place.

What need of words? It is the Spirit that giveth life. The flame was kindled in the heart of the child because it burned undimmed in the mother's heart. Not by preaching, nor even by much speaking, will our teachers teach religion. But they will surely teach, whose lives abide in the shadow of the Almighty. We cannot but speak the things we have seen and heard. Striving to do His will in the schoolroom, we slowly learn of the doctrine, and the truth we have made our own we are enabled to share.