The Moral and Religious Training of Children [pp. 26-48]

THE PRINCE TON RE VIE W.
and is inversely as real religion, and the study of it is not, like
systematic ethics, apt to be confused and made unpractical by
conflicting theories.
The Bible, the great instrument in the education of conscience, is far less juvenile than it is now the fashion to suppose.
At the very least it expresses the result of the ripest human
experience, the noblest traditions of humanity. Old Testament
history, even more than most very ancient history, is distilled to
an almost purely ethical content. For centuries Scripture was
withheld from the masses for the same reason that Plato refused
at first to put his thoughts into writing, because it would be
sure to be misunderstood by very many and lead to that worst
of errors and fanaticism caused by half-truths. Children should
not approach it too lightly. It might seem that doctrinal catechisms were the most unpedagogic methods of approach, but a
more baleful one has been developed in the ardor of those Sunday-school teachers who require devotion in their closet as the
chief means of preparation, and go tingling with the selfconsciousness which is the bane of American childhood to
inoculate their classes with their own neurological states. Belief
is actually made a duty; and as if that, as too often taught,
were not enough to stultify conscience, it is made the supreme
duty and a condition of salvation even for children.
The Old Testament, rather than the New, is the Bible for
childhood. A good, protracted course of the law must pedagogically prepare the way for the apprehension of the Gospel.
Even for the Old Testament, a propadeutic selection of the
choicest moral tales from Catholic legends, classic and Hindoo
mythology, ancient myths and fables, German marchen, and perhaps from the Bibles of other religions, etc., should serve as a
sort of introduction. What a Sunday-school library might be
gradually developed from such sources, in place of the trashy and
even pathological matter so commonly in use! Then the study
of the Old Testament should begin with selected tales, told, as
in the German schools, impressively, in the teacher's language,
but objectively, and without exegetical or hortatory comment.
The appeal is directly to the understanding only at first, but the
moral lesson is brought clearly and surely within the child's
reach, but not personally applied after the manner common with
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