Sunday-School Libraries. By Rev. Sanford H. Cobb [pp. 369-382]

Sunday-School Libraries.
Knocking at the Door," and keeping it until read through. It
was an instance almost entirely unique in the experience of the
last ten years. We have essayed in vain to induce pupils, of fifteen years of age and upwards, to read Bunyan's "Pilgrim's
Progress " and "Holy War," and Richmond's "Annals of the
Poor." Even the Schonberg-Cotta books were regarded as
too dull. They preferred the fashionable and frivolous novelette. We are acquainted with a Sunday School on whose
library shelves there have been for twenty-five years a number
of books, of the class of which Baxter and Pike are the best
known examples, which show to-day no sign of use, but only
the stains of dust and the yellowness of age; while hundreds
of other books, weak, silly, false, have been worn out by the
hands of frequent readers, and replaced by others of the same
stamp a dozen times. It cannot, of course, be expected that
works of the more solid cast mentioned above would be read
by the younger readers, but the minds of the older ones and
of the teachers are certainly able to appreciate them. At all
events it causes grave doubts as to the correctness of our more
modern methods of training, when books of' the most useful
class remain in a large school almost entirely untouched for a
quarter of a century. And we may say further, that no properly
instructed mind, however young, if able to read and think,
can fail of being interested in the story of the Pilgrimn, of
watching with keen pleasure the inarchings, strategy, and conflicts of the Holy War, or learning something sweet and lovely
from the lips of the Dairyman's Daughter. Such books as
these are Christian classics, the possession of thle Church forever, and it is a dreadful injury done to the Church herself,
that the minds of her children are becoming so beguiled as to
be unable to see beauty in theni. They are books which
none can afford not to know. But how many children to-day
read them?
Indeed, how many children, or young people, to-day read
anything that is useful, or anything that taxes thought at all?
That is becoming a serious question which is presented to the
minds of parents and instructors by the reading tastes of
young people of the present day. They are devoted to fiction,
:.ad generally the more highly seasoned, the more to their
!r:!.-*..
376
[JULY,