flPPAPYOr ppiMPPTOM 
 
 MAR 16 2004 
 
 THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 %le]'UoiU'hnil , 1862- 
 
 1951. 
 A social theory of religioui 
 
 education 
 
A SOCIAL THEORY 
 
 OF 
 
 RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 
 
A SOCIAL THEORY 
 
 OF 
 
 RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE ALBERT COE 
 
 PB0FEB80B IN THE CNION THSOLOGICAL SEMINABT, NEW TOBE CITT 
 
 LIBRARY OF PRINCETON 
 
 MAR 16 2004 
 
 THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1919 
 
COPTHIOHT, 1917, BY 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 Published October; 1917 
 
TO 
 HARRY F. WARD 
 
 WHO SEES 
 
 AND 
 
 MAKES OTHERS SEE 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 What consequences for religious education follow from the ^ 
 now widely accepted social interpretation of the Christian mes- 
 sage ? The present work is an attempt to answer this question. 
 
 The answer is not simple. For the social message does not 
 require us merely to insert this or that new duty into our present 
 scheme of living, but also to judge every detail of conduct from 
 a higher point of view. We are required to organize the whole 
 of life upon a different level. 
 
 It would be strange indeed if the new meaning that this gives 
 to e very-day affairs did not change our outlook upon child life. 
 If we are to be logical and practical in our social Christianity, 
 we must revise our policies with respect to children at least as 
 much as our policies with respect to adults. The chapters 
 that follow undertake to show the directions that this revision 
 will need to take. 
 
 As we proceed, it will appear that the whole perspective of 
 religious education undergoes a change. The central purpose, 
 to begin with, grows more specific because the nature of good- 
 ness is seen to be as concrete as the neighbor who lives next 
 door. Christian experience comes out of the clouds, because 
 in our dealings with our brother whom we have seen we are deal- 
 ing with the Father whom we have not seen — yes, we here come 
 into relation with what is deepest in his character and purposes. 
 To Christian ears these statements do not sound strange, per- 
 haps, yet when they are applied to the religious life of the 
 young they do sing a new melody. A profounder significance 
 attaches to the will of a child, and especially to his relations 
 with persons, whether children or adults. ^ 
 
 All the plans and methods of religious education have now 
 to be reorganized with reference to these social relations and 
 
 vii 
 
viii FOREWORD 
 
 experiences. A new measure is provided for the material 
 that goes into the curriculum of instruction. Organizations 
 that undertake to educate, whether the family or the church, 
 meet a different test from that which has been traditional. 
 Theological and ecclesiastical types take on new meaning, and 
 they encounter demands that they have not always foreseen. 
 The educational relations between state and church, likewise, 
 have a different look when we approach them from the stand- 
 point of a thoroughly socialized religion. Not less true is it 
 that emphasis now shifts from one part of educational psychology 
 to another. 
 
 Through my whole discussion there runs a conviction that 
 within Protestantism there is, or is coming to be, a distinctive 
 religious principle, that of a divine-human industrial democracy. 
 "My Father worketh even until now, and I work." I believe 
 that here the Christian religion contains a permanently progres- 
 sive element, and therefore a motive for self-criticism as well 
 as for criticism of "the world." Religious education, conse- 
 quently, is here thought of not merely as a process whereby an- 
 cient standards are transmitted, but also as having a part in 
 the revision of standards themselves. 
 
 Another conviction that controls my discussion is that educa- 
 tional organization and methods are not static tools, like 
 saws and hammers, which are indifferent to the structures that 
 they build, but living and moving parts of the collective life. 
 A democracy cannot afford to use in its public schools the 
 methods that an autocratic state finds adapted to its purposes. 
 When the purposes of society are transformed, education must 
 be made over. Protestantism cannot make Protestants of its 
 children by the methods of Catholic teaching. A divine- 
 human democracy cannot grow up through educative processes 
 that have in their nostrils the breath of autocracy. 
 
 These are themes of high intellectual interest. They are 
 also religious issues of the greatest import. They have a direct 
 bearing upon even the ordinary duties of religious educators. 
 The humblest worker will do better work if he knows the why 
 and the whither of it than he will if he merely follows some 
 
FOREWORD ix 
 
 prescription. Therefore I hope that this book of mine will be 
 found practically helpful by those who bear the heat and the 
 burden of the day in the schools of the church, as well as by 
 those who guide congregations or whole communions. 
 
 As my study of this theme has progressed, I have been more 
 and more conscious of the magnitude of the problem, and of 
 its unending ramifications. I cannot hope to have said the 
 last word, nor to have escaped error, but I dare to hope that 
 others will be stimulated to face the issues and to declare their 
 own convictions. I trust also that my faults will be judged in 
 the light of the fact that this is the first attempt to work out in 
 a systematic way the consequences that will follow for religious 
 education when it is controlled by a fully social interpretation of 
 the Christian message. 
 
 While these chapters have been in progress the wail of chil- 
 dren in the lands at war has been in my ears, a wail for the 
 fathers of whom they have been bereft, a wail for bread, a wail 
 for a decent world in which to grow up. To my thinking it is 
 a cry from all the children of the world for the sort of education 
 that faces, and understands, the great madness that is abroad, 
 and not only understands, but also knows the resources of 
 human nature and of religion. Even while I have been writing 
 about educating children in the love that loves to the utter- 
 most, I, as a citizen of the United States, have gone to war I 
 I am so bound into one with my neighbors that I cannot, if I 
 would, act as a mere individual; and my neighbors and I, who 
 constitute the United States of America, are so bound up with 
 neighbors beyond our national boundaries that our moral 
 destiny is intertwined with theirs. We and they must rise to- 
 gether, or we shall not rise at all. Forward, out of nationalism, 
 with its limitations upon brotherhood, into world society ! But 
 we are partly of the past, "red in tooth and claw," and only 
 partly of the ideal future. With our hands we fight our broth- 
 ers; with our hearts we abhor fighting. 'Wretched men that 
 we are 1 Who shall deliver us out of the body of this death ? ' 
 
 The future of society depends upon the sort of social education 
 that we think it worth while to provide. 
 
X FOREWORD 
 
 Any reader who is familiar with present movements in educa- 
 tional thought will perceive, as this work proceeds, how much 
 I owe to writers who have had in mind the public school rather 
 than religious education. I am indebted most of all to John 
 Dewey, who is foremost among those who have put education 
 and industrial democracy into a single perspective. 
 
 George A. Coe. 
 
 Glendora, California, 
 May 12, 1917. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAoa 
 
 Foreword vii 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 CHAPTEB 
 
 I. Why So Much Theorizing? 3 
 
 PART I 
 
 THE SOCIAL STANDPOINT IN MODERN EDUCATION 
 
 II. General Exposition of the Social Stand- 
 point 13 
 
 III. The Philosophical Setting of the New 
 
 Social Ideals in Education 25 
 
 IV. The Place of the Individual in a Socialized 
 
 Education 38 
 
 PART II 
 
 THE SOCIAL INTERPRETATION OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 REQUIRES SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION IN 
 
 RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 
 
 V. The Aims of Christian Education .... 53/^ 
 
 VI. The First Essentials of an Educational 
 
 Plan 64 
 
 xi 
 
xii CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTEB PAQB 
 
 VII. The Educative Process is Religious Experi- 
 ence 74 
 
 VIII. The Church as Educator 85 
 
 IX. A New Theory of the Curriculum .... 97 
 
 PART III 
 
 the psychological background of a social- 
 ized RELIGIOUS education 
 
 X. The Social Nature of Man 119 
 
 XI. Children's Faith in God 138 
 
 XII. The Religious Limitations of Children . 147 
 
 XIII. The Struggle with Sin 164 
 
 XIV. The Learning Process Considered as the 
 
 Achieving of Character 184 
 
 PART IV 
 
 THE ORGANIZATION OF A SOCIALIZED RELIGIOUS 
 EDUCATION 
 
 XV. The Christian Reorganization of the 
 
 Family 207 
 
 XVI. The Church School 226 
 
 XVII. Educational Relations between State and 
 
 Church 248 
 
 XVIII. The Denominational Department of Relig- 
 ious Education 266 
 
 XIX. Beyond the Denominations 283 
 
CONTENTS xiii 
 PART V 
 
 CHAPTER PAQB 
 
 EXISTING TENDENCIES IN CHRISTIAN EDUCATION 
 VIEWED FROM THE SOCIAL STANDPOINT 
 
 XX. The Roman Catholic Type 295 
 
 XXI. The Dogmatic Protestant Type 304 
 
 XXII. The Ritualistic Protestant Type .... 316 
 
 XXIII. Educational Tendencies of Evangelicalism 324 
 
 XXIV. Educational Tendencies of Liberalism . . 335 
 
 Classified Bibliography 343 
 
 Index 357 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
CHAPTER I 
 WHY SO MUCH THEORIZING? 
 
 Have we theory enough abready? Whoever makes a re- 
 flective choice between educational ends, and then determines 
 by systematic analysis what are in general the means whereby 
 the chosen ends can be most certainly and most economically 
 reached, has a theory of education in the sense in which the 
 term "theory" is used in this work. A theory of education, 
 then, is simply knowledge of what we as educators want and 
 how to get it. 
 
 A committee was discussing plans for a training institute for 
 workers in religious education. "What we want," said one 
 member of the committee, "is something practical. We don't 
 want theories." To this another committeeman replied: 
 " What have you against theories ? We have practice already, 
 and practice is what makes all our trouble. Theory is the thing 
 we need. We're perishing for want of it!" Doubtless the 
 first of these men meant to stand for applied knowledge as 
 against ineffective thinking, while the second meant to stand 
 for applied knowledge as against ineffective practice. Both 
 really wanted theory in the present sense of the term. 
 
 Of theory in this sense we can never have too much. That 
 we have, in fact, altogether too little of it — that our workers 
 do not discriminate with sufficient care either ends or means, 
 do not think enough upon what they are about — is certain. 
 An enthusiastic young student of religious education, upon a 
 visit of observation to a certain Sunday school, asked the super- 
 intendent: " What is the purpose of this school ? " The super- 
 intendent hesitated, requested that the question be repeated. 
 
4 THE NEED OF THEORY 
 
 hemmed and hawed, and finally replied: "Well, what do you 
 think it ought to be?" The simple fact is that we are doing a 
 great many things because they have been done before rather 
 than because we have a reason for doing them. If we are 
 asked for a reason we commonly give one that is so general as 
 to be without point. We say, for example, that our aim is to 
 make our pupils Christians, but if we are then required to say 
 whether we aim to make all of them Christians immediately, 
 on the present Sunday, or only by and by, and just what we 
 mean by a pupil-Christian, it turns out that our apparently 
 clear end is foggy after all. 
 
 Nor is the case any better with our notions of the means to 
 be employed. Which is the most certain and the most eco- 
 nomical way to produce such or such a change in this or that 
 Sunday-school class ? Are you pursuing your present methods 
 because you have any reason to suppose that they are the most 
 effective possible ? And when the work of a year or of a series 
 of years is done, how do you definitely know to what extent 
 you have attained your purpose ? Questions like these answer 
 themselves. Our work is famishing, and our pupils are perish- 
 ing, because we have not enough theory. 
 
 Ineffective practice produces defective theory, and per- 
 petuates ineffectiveness thereby. It is no more true that a 
 poor theory leads to poor practice than that poor practice 
 leads to poor theory. Theories of education have all arisen 
 within practice; they are attempts to think out what already 
 exists. The reason why we stop to think is, indeed, that we 
 are not altogether satisfied with things as they are, but yet 
 we do not invent a better state of things "just out of our heads." 
 No, we make improvements by mixing a little that is new 
 with much that is old, and this mixing occurs in our thinking 
 as well as in our practice. That is, more or less of yesterday's 
 practice is always taken into to-day's thinking as a presupposi- 
 tion, or not-yet-analyzed premise, and then this thinking is 
 used to justify the very practice from which it is derived. Now, 
 some of yesterday's faults always escape attention; some of them 
 are ever being accepted as virtues. For example, methods of 
 
THE NEED OF THEORY 5 
 
 family (iisclpllne that defeated their own aims have dominated 
 theories of such discIpHne. Many a parent has conscientiously 
 made goodness unattractive to his children, and then recom- 
 mended that all parents go and do likewise ! Many a progres- 
 sive-minded Sunday-school worker unconsciously bends his 
 standards to fit Sunday schools as they are. He has a theory, 
 but it is not sufficiently critical. 
 
 The consequence of this is that the cause of religious educa- 
 tion requires the repeated reopening of matters that seem to 
 be already settled. The reason is not that revolutions are 
 desirable, but that our thinking, being under the influence of 
 our own defective past, never reaches a point where it can prop- 
 erly say: "Here I have reached finality; here revision will 
 never be necessary.' ' This is the pride that goes before a fall. 
 The spirit of true theorizing is humble. It says to itself: "In 
 all probability my present views of religious education are a 
 mixture of truth and error. Let me, then, scrutinize them once 
 more, and may the succession of scrutinizers never fail I" 
 
 The main problem is how to make Christian education 
 sufficiently, as well as efficiently, Christian. We should stum- 
 ble into a total misconception if we were to think of a theory 
 of religious education as an attempt to control religion from 
 outside itself, as, for example, by mere speculation. No, it 
 is an attempt to judge our religious performances from within 
 religion. Christian education is to be thought of as through 
 and through the Christian religion in operation. Its methods 
 are to be scrutinized and revised from the sole point of view 
 of religious effectiveness. Its aims also are to be weighed in 
 religious scales, and no others. 
 
 Not only do old methods come to us bringing hay, wood, and 
 stubble along with precious metal, but the same is true of old 
 purposes. They, also, as well as methods, have to be " trued 
 up" from time to time, partly because we forget something 
 that came to us in the hour of spiritual vision, partly because 
 insight Into the meaning of life does not attain fixity in any 
 generation. There ar« depths in the Christian message that 
 our fathers' plummets did not sound ; there are depths that will 
 
6 THE NEED OF THEORY 
 
 remain unknown until generations yet to be born shall ask their 
 own fresh questions. Accordingly, when we reflect upon the 
 existing aims of Chfistian education with a view to revising 
 them, we are engaged in an attempt to make them more Chris- 
 tian. We are not satisfied to become more efficient upon yes- 
 terday's religious level; we aspire to raise the level itself. Our 
 problem is to make Christian education as Christian as possible. 
 The application of this remark to the situation of the churches 
 to-day is unmistakable. The aims and methods of Christian 
 education, as of church life in general, that this generation 
 inherited were predominantly mdividualistic. We have been 
 so taught as to think of the great salvation as a rescuing of in- 
 dividuals, each by himself, from the guilt and the power of sin, 
 and of establishing them, each by himself, in the way of right- 
 eousness. When Canon Fremantle gave us the phrase "the 
 world as the subject of redemption" we had to think twice be- 
 fore we could see just what it meant. For most Christians 
 were still thinking of the increase of Christ's kingdom in terms 
 of a mere census, a mere count of individuals rescued out of an 
 evil world. But our generation has come to see that the re- 
 demptive mission of the Christ is nothing less than that of 
 transforming the social order itself into a brotherhood or family 
 of God. We are not saved, each by himself, and then added 
 to one another like marbles in a bag or like grains of sand in 
 a sand pile. A saved society is not made by any such external 
 process. We are members one of another in our sins, and we 
 are members one of another in the whole process of being saved 
 from sin. I cannot go alone either toward or away from the 
 kingdom, for it is my relation to some one else, a relation of 
 help or of hinderance, that^determines the direction that my own 
 character is taking. " In this the children of God are manifest, 
 and the children of the devil: Whosoever doeth not righteous- 
 ness is not of God, neither he that loveth not his brother. 
 For this is the message that ye heard from the beginning, that 
 we should love one another." For us of the present generation 
 the duty of making Christian education sufl[iciently Christian 
 will mean bringing it into line with this social message. 
 
THE NEED OF THEORY 7 
 
 Love as an inclusive law for education has not been worked 
 out in theory or tried in practice. This is an astonishing 
 thing to say, but it is strictly true. We have endeavored to 
 include love within education as one item among many, but we 
 have not taken it as the higher and inclusive conception by 
 which to determine our aims and by which to test our methods. 
 We have been accustomed to start the educative process out- 
 side of the act of loving, say in some dogma or religious rite, 
 expecting somehow to get inside love at some later time. We 
 have not thought of method as systematized love producing 
 its like, that is, as the divine social order, already started on 
 earth, and here and now giving children a place and an incentive 
 to grow within itself. We have not conceived religious educa- 
 tion as itself a part of the campaign for the social righteousness 
 that the law of love requires, or as an actual initiation into the 
 social relations that belong to the citizens of the kingdom. 
 Rather, we have assumed that the campaign for social righteous- 
 ness is an affair of adults exclusively. We have even hesitated 
 to bring it to church with us lest it should disturb reposeful 
 contemplation of God. As if we could contemplate the Father 
 without thinking about that upon which his heart is set, or as 
 if he himself could have peace of mind only by taking a vaca- 
 tion from the rest of the family ! 
 
 Here and there, in fragmentary ways, we have begun, it 
 is true, to experiment with lessons that touch upon love in action. 
 Social-service activities, moreover, have here and there be- 
 come a regular part of the educative procedure. But as yet 
 these are additions to presocial religious education, or pallia- 
 tives of it, rather than an attempt to socialize the whole con- 
 trol. Thorough socialization will require a fresh approach to 
 the curriculum as a whole. It will require us to re-examine 
 the organization of religious education in order to see whether 
 the social relations in which the child is here already placed 
 do themselves train him in active love and in methods of 
 co-operation. It will require us to scrutinize every de- 
 tail of teaching method to see what sort of social relation 
 it involves between teacher and taught, and between pupil 
 
8 THE NEED OF THEORY 
 
 and pupil. Here, surely, is need for a theory of religious edu- 
 cation. 
 
 The theory of public education is undergoing a trans- 
 formation that is of the utmost significance for the churches. 
 
 The old assumptions of public education, like those of religious 
 education, were individualistic. The day school was expected 
 to put the pupil into possession of certain tools (as reading 
 and writing), and to impart a certain minimum amount of 
 useful knowledge (as geography), all of which was thought of 
 as preparing him to live as an individual. To-day we cannot 
 think of the public schools as having any smaller task than 
 that of preparing young citizens for living together. Moreover, 
 we are engaged, in both theory and practice, in bringing school 
 training closer and closer to the every-day occupation of a citi- 
 zen, his labor for a livelihood. 
 
 The growth of the social idea and of the industrial idea in 
 public education is significant for the churches in several ways. 
 In the first place, humanitarianism is getting a new organ, one 
 that promises to become immensely efficient. The state can 
 hardly train its citizens in the art of living together without 
 teaching, more or less, the brotherhood that is of the heart. 
 Nor can this teaching go very far before it awakens thought 
 upon the ancient injustices that persist in society. Moreover, 
 when the school, with this growing social outlook and inlook, 
 is brought close to the industries, it is bound, sooner or later, 
 to interpret to our whole people, either intentionally or other- 
 wise, the meaning of " the food which perisheth," the significance 
 of labor, of income, and of wealth. All these are ancient in- 
 terests of the Christian preacher, and they are present, vital 
 concerns for Christian teaching, whether of adults or of chil- 
 dren. 
 
 What shall the churches do, then, with respect to these new 
 developments in the theory of public education? How can 
 we be unmoved by what is going on? If we really believe in 
 the axioms of Christian living, we cannot be indifferent. Nay, 
 we whose consciences are just now being pricked by the neglected 
 social elements in our religion, if we have even a moderate 
 
THE NEED OF THEORY 9 
 
 amount of practical sense, must take our place as citizens be- 
 side those who have seen a social vision in public education. 
 We must try to understand what the vision saith; we must 
 support and encourage the reformers in their hard task, and we 
 must gladly tax ourselves for public education as we have never 
 taxed ourselves before. 
 
 But we shall not empty out of the church into the state 
 school the whole function of social education. Rather, we shall 
 define and realize more definitely than ever before the educa- 
 tional implications of the old faith that God himself is love. 
 Gladly co-operating with every one who endeavors to put the 
 love of one's neighbor into education, we shall go on to probe 
 the educational significance of the two great commandments 
 in the Christian faith. For us there must be a theory and a 
 practice in which the love of God to us and our love to him are 
 not separated from, but realized in, our efforts toward ideal 
 society, the family or kingdom of God. Such a theory of 
 Christian education we have not as yet. 
 
 Four components of educational theory. The divisions 
 adopted by each writer upon this subject are likely to depend 
 more or less upon his notion of convenience in exposition. 
 But the following components will be found in one or another 
 form in any broad analysis: 
 
 (1) An indication of the kind of society that is regarded as 
 desirable. 
 
 (2) A conception of the original nature of children. 
 
 (3) A conception of the sorts of individual experience that will 
 most surely and economically produce in such children the kind 
 of sociality that is desired. 
 
 (4) A statement of at least the more general standards and 
 tests by which one may judge the degree to which these sorts 
 of experience are being provided by any educational institu- 
 tion or process. 
 
 All four of these parts of a complete theory will be found in 
 the following pages, though not in this precise order. In a 
 general way. Chapters II to V, inclusive, concern the first 
 point; Chapters X to XIII, the second; Chapters VI to IX and 
 
10 THE NEED OF THEORY 
 
 Chapter XIV, the third, and the remainder of the book the 
 fourth. But I have made no effort to schematize my treat- 
 ment. Rather, I have endeavored to be concrete, even though 
 thereby problems crowd together somewhat, and even though 
 the same problem appears more than once. 
 
PART I 
 
 THE SOCIAL STANDPOINT IN MODERN 
 
 EDUCATION 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 GENERAL EXPOSITION OF THE SOCIAL 
 STANDPOINT 
 
 Various uses of the term education. Education, in the 
 broadest sense of the term, takes place wherever a plastic 
 mind acquires a set of any kind. It is often said, for example, 
 that a child receives much of his education from contact with 
 nature— from falls and bruises, obstacles and achievements, 
 and the beauty of natural scenery. 
 
 In a less broad sense, education lies in the contribution made 
 by society to the set of a mind. Again and again has it been 
 pointed out that only through association with his elders can a 
 child attain to civilized life at all. The total difference that 
 such association makes in the organization and outlook of 
 his mind may be regarded as the education that he receives. 
 The ways in which society forms an individual are, however, 
 in large measure unsystematic and even unintended. The 
 "social inheritance" of an American child, for example, in- 
 cludes the influence upon him of all such things as sights and 
 sounds upon the street; newspapers; public amusements; 
 political contests; business and social customs; waves of public 
 opinion; home conditions — indeed, the influence of every man 
 and of every "man way" that he meets. 
 
 As far as these things — any of them — are controlled for the 
 'purpose of giving a set to young minds, we have education in 
 the third and strictly technical sense. 
 
 It is with education thus technically understood that the 
 present book is primarily concerned. Often, indeed, we shall 
 find ourselves analyzing the unintended influence of men and 
 women upon children, but always for the sake, ultimately, of 
 more clearly defining our deliberate purposes. Deliberate ~^ 
 
 13 
 
14 THE SOCIAL STANDPOINT 
 
 educational purpose underlies many undertakings besides 
 schools. A family is an educational institution. The same 
 can be said of certain phases of the public library, the art mu- 
 seum, and the natural history collection of to-day. For they 
 arrange their possessions and advertise them in part with the 
 young in mind, and they even provide trained instructors. 
 The children's room, the children's adviser, and the story 
 hour in the modern library are educationally eloquent. The 
 playground movement likewise is educational in the strict 
 sense, for it accepts the axiom that facilities for play should 
 be so organized that the players will form socially valuable 
 habits. 
 
 The position of the churches in this constellation will have 
 our attention after a time. But even this partial and merely 
 representative list of the educational institutions of modern 
 society would be defectively representative if it did not men- 
 tion juvenile courts and new types of law concerning children 
 and youth. When a child violates a law or an ordinance, an 
 enlightened legal system no longer merely inflicts pain and 
 deprivation upon him because of his past, but considers how to 
 form him into a good citizen. To this end, physical, mental, 
 and social diagnosis is employed to discover the causes of the 
 delinquency, and then the offender is sentenced to he educated 
 by the most skilful methods that science can devise ! This 
 blending of the conception of justice with that of education is 
 extending itself to various parts of law. The abolition of child 
 labor, and the restriction of labor in the adolescent years, have 
 an avowedly educational motive, as have ordinances that 
 regulate the relations of children to the streets and to public 
 amusements. We are, in fact, moving toward the notion that 
 society, wherever it is in contact with children and youth, 
 should be a consciously educational force — in short, that the 
 young should be constantly at school merely by virtue of 
 their presence in our civilization. 
 
 Society is not merely one educator among many; it is the 
 prime educator within all educational enterprises. If teach- 
 ers, parents, librarians, story-tellers, playground directors. 
 
THE SOCIAL STANDPOINT 15 
 
 judges in juvenile courts, and legislators who press for child- 
 labor laws will but reflect upon their educational enterprise, 
 they will perceive that it is not their own. They act as agents 
 for society. This means not only that they labor toward social 
 ends, but also that the power that does the work is one or 
 another social influence operating through them. This is 
 obvious in the case of all who are employed by state or church, 
 but it is true of the others also. A parent teaching his child 
 a grammatical form, or manners at table, or a standard of 
 moral conduct, is himself at the moment under the control of 
 his group in respect both to what he teaches and to the fact that 
 he teaches anything at all. Moreover, the effectiveness of his 
 teaching depends in large measure upon the existence of a social 
 environment that backs it up. In a profound sense, then, 
 the educator in all education is society. This proposition is 
 not invalidated by the incompleteness of our social integration 
 — our divisions into parties, social classes, and churches — 
 with the resulting ambiguity of the term "society." For in 
 each of these groupings the educational worker is moved by 
 his group consciousness, and he endeavors to give effect to the 
 things that bind him to his fellows, be the fellowship narrow or 
 broad. 
 
 "Unfolding the powers of the child" is an inadequate con- 
 ception of the work of education. Since society is the educa- 
 tor, we may ask next. What is society about when it educates ? 
 It is dealing, of course, with unfolding powers or growth. But 
 every child has many powers, better and worse. It is the 
 essence of education to discriminate between them, and while 
 promoting the growth of some, to prevent the growth of others. 
 The same distinction has to be made when we meet the state- 
 ment that the aim is to help children toward " self-realization," 
 for behind this statement lies the unexpressed assumption that 
 there are different sorts of self that an individual may become, 
 and that education must give the advantage to some of these 
 as against others. 
 
 What education does is, in a word, to bring the child and 
 society together. It increases one's participation in the com- 
 
16 THE SOCIAL STANDPOINT 
 
 mon life. It puts a child into possession of the tools of social 
 intercourse, such as language and numbers; opens his eyes to 
 treasures of literature, art, and science that society has grad- 
 ually accumulated through generations; causes him to appre- 
 ciate such social organizations as the state, and develops habits 
 appropriate thereto; prepares him to be a producer in some 
 socially valuable field of labor, and evokes an inner control 
 whereby he may judge and guide himself in the interest of 
 social well being. 
 
 Education aims at "social adjustment and social effi- 
 ciency." This phrase represents the strong reaction of re- 
 cent years against all formal conceptions of education, that is, 
 conceptions that involve no notion of guiding the young in the 
 social application of the powers that education brings out. To 
 define the aim of education as the unfolding of children's 
 powers is like saying that the purpose of a railroad is to cause 
 cars to move from one place to another. What the cars carry 
 and whither they are going are the important considerations. 
 The strains that have developed within our industrial and civic 
 life since the coming of machine manufacture, steam transporta- 
 tion, and the massing of the populace in cities have compelled 
 us to see that the attitudes and the outlook of children with 
 respect to their fellow men are the prime concern of schools. 
 At the same time, poverty on the one hand, and the increas- 
 ing specialization of occupations and of industrial and commer- 
 cial processes on the other, have convinced educationists — that 
 is, those who investigate education and promote educational 
 standards — that every child ought to receive assistance in the 
 selection of his occupation, and also specific preparation for 
 skilful work in it. The more democratically minded among 
 us are coming to think of the future in terms of industrial de- 
 mocracy, an organization of producers governed by producers. 
 Hence it comes to pass that progressive schoolmen are largely 
 occupied at the present moment with problems of occupational 
 training and vocational guidance. 
 
 Scarcely more than twenty-five years ago educationists were 
 still disavowing industrial ends, which they distinguished from 
 
THE SOCIAL STANDPOINT 17 
 
 those of "general" culture. Manual training was in some of 
 the schools for the sake of formal mental discipline and the 
 teaching of numbers, but avowedly not as an introduction to 
 fundamental processes in manual industries. I remember a 
 time when college heads turned up their noses at "bread-and- 
 butter education." If the blindness of some efforts at the " prac- 
 tical" partly justified this scorn, it in turn was blind in that it 
 saw not the social-ethical significance of earning one's living 
 by daily toil in one's trade or profession. 
 
 To-day we think of education as a way of getting the human 
 energy of each new generation effectively applied to the main- 
 tenance and the increase of human welfare of whatever sort. 
 Keeping children well, and teaching them how to keep them- 
 selves and their community well; showing them how to manage 
 a home, with its need for many sorts of skill; introducing them 
 to the civic, industrial, and philanthropic institutions of their 
 community; acquainting them with the machinery of govern- 
 ment and with the duties of citizens; opening the way to skill 
 in an occupation, and revealing the riches of play as well as of 
 literature and the fine arts — all this, which the schools of 
 yesterday left largely to chance, is being incorporated into an 
 education that deserves to be called " new." 
 
 The reason for mentioning these things in a discussion of 
 religious education will appear fully in later chapters. Al- 
 ready, however, it must be evident that the relations of the 
 church to the child as well as to the adult are going to have 
 their setting in a new world. Religious education is bound to 
 be judged from fresh standpoints. "Imparting" certain "sub- 
 jects of instruction" is becoming thin and threadbare as a 
 conception of teaching. "Inciting" to "virtue" in general will 
 seem flat to children who are accustomed in their daily school- 
 ing to the enrichment of concrete social experience and to par- 
 ticipation in important specific social enterprises. Moreover, 
 when the schools become an agency for applying human en- 
 ergy, instead of providing a merely general or unapplied cul- 
 ture, they move in the realm of life purposes in which religion 
 has a vital interest. In particular, education that aims to pro- 
 
18 THE SOCIAL STANDPOINT 
 
 duce devotion to the social weal touches at its very heart the 
 religion that has set out to change society into a brotherhood. 
 
 Education aims also at the progressive reconstruction of 
 society. Adjustment of a child to society just as it is does not 
 satisfy the educational conscience, or even the conscience of 
 society in general. Our social conservatives themselves would 
 condemn an educational system that sought to preserve our 
 social organization unchanged. No; education selects some 
 parts for preservation, while it condemns other parts, and 
 toward still others is silent lest children should find out how 
 bad we are. What a confession society makes in every school 
 that it supports ! It says, in substance : " Here are a few things 
 of permanent worth that we have already achieved; here, in 
 addition, are our many unfulfilled aspirations, our unsolved 
 problems. Try to be wiser and better than we have been." 
 Thus, education is not only society's supreme act of self- 
 preservation; it is also society's most sincere judgment upon 
 its own defects, and its supreme effort at self-improvement. 
 
 These statements do indeed outrun most of our educational 
 practice. Our dealings with the young, especially our insti- 
 tutional dealings, have no immunity from the inertia of tradition 
 or from the anaesthesia of self-interest; and our thinking, as 
 was indicated at the beginning of Chapter I, grows within 
 practice, not in a different world. Actual education is a mix- 
 ture of points of view. Nevertheless, the idealization of life, 
 which implicitly if not explicitly condemns our actual life, is of 
 the essence of educational practice. At the present moment, 
 far more than yesterday, this idealizing takes on the social hue 
 of almost all intense ethical reflection in our day. If, then, I 
 have myself idealized the social aim of education, I have merely 
 used with respect to education its own method of viewing life. 
 
 The basal process in education is social interaction. To 
 bring society and the individual child together is the aim. 
 This means that what we have to teach the child is humane and 
 jiist living in the various relationships, and also active, well 
 directed labor that contributes to the common life of the pres- 
 ent and likewise to the improvement of it. It might seem 
 
THE SOCIAL STANDPOINT 19 
 
 superfluous, but the history of schools proves that it is not, to 
 point out that, in the last analysis, social experience is the only 
 thing that can thus socialize any one. The first concern of 
 education is not a text-book or anything that printer's ink can 
 convey, but the persons with whom the pupil is in contact, and 
 the sort of social interactions in which he has a part. On the 
 face of the matter, how could any one become adjusted to society 
 in the absence of society, or become socially efficient without 
 social practice? 
 
 Some applications of this principle appear as soon as we 
 begin to reflect upon it, but others are less obvious and more at 
 variance with tradition. In respect to the more obvious per- 
 sonal relations between pupil and teacher, and between pupil 
 and pupil, the principle is already in operation in progressive 
 schools. Thus: 
 
 (1) The conduct and the personality of the teacher are generally 
 recognized as of prime importance. It must be admitted, never- 
 theless, that present methods for training teachers do not 
 luminously suggest any theory as to how the desired personal 
 qualities can be developed. Moreover, neither the economic 
 status of teachers, nor methods of appointment and dismissal, 
 nor provisions for growth and for social practice after entering 
 the service, can be quite reconciled, as they stand to-day, 
 with the universal emphasis upon personality. 
 
 (2) In the organization and management of a school, and of 
 each schoolroom, every enlightened teacher sees an opportunity 
 to train children in co-operation and self-government. The term 
 "self-government" should not be restricted to experiments in 
 which pupils have been organized in imitation of the State, 
 with its legislative, judicial, and executive officers. Self- 
 government is more than social mechanism of any pattern. 
 It is first of all socialization of the teacher's attitude toward 
 pupils, that is, recognition of the present value of the pupil's 
 personality. From this recognition will flow encouragement to 
 free action, to free reflection, and to specific methods for the 
 organization of freedom, with its inevitable social pleasures and 
 pains. It is not the elaborateness of these methods that 
 
20 THE SOCIAL STANDPOINT 
 
 counts, nor yet the absence of influence from the teacher. 
 There can be, and in some experiments in pupil-government 
 there appears to have been, an artificial sociality — artificial be- 
 cause created merely ad hoc and isolated from the larger society. 
 What is needed is the development of freedom, initiative, and 
 co-operation within the existing relations not only between pupil 
 and pupil, but also between pupils on the one hand and their 
 teachers, the local community, and the State, on the other. 
 Self-government in this sense is the sure touchstone of school 
 discipline. 
 
 (3) In the modern school, the play of pupils, which is made 
 up almost altogether of social interactions, comes under supervision. 
 The least reason for supervision is the prevention of abuses; 
 the primary function is the promotion of social and socializing 
 play. Hence, the supervisor of the playground teaches the 
 children games adapted to their respective social capacities, 
 and assists in the management of contests, all with a view to 
 the discipline of social joys through the enrichment of them. 
 
 (4) Studying and reciting also are a field for social experience. 
 Instead of trying to isolate each pupil with his book, and then 
 instead of stimulating each one in the recitation to selfish 
 emulation, or to purely self-regarding avoidance of discomfort, 
 the teacher treats the subject-matter as a social possession, and 
 as a sphere for a co-operative enterprise in learning, so that 
 each pupil " contributes to the recitation." 
 
 (5) The school of to-day introduces the pupil to community life, 
 and gives him real functions in it. Around elections, holidays, 
 civic anniversaries and festivals, much instruction in the ideals 
 and the ways of society is made to centre. Historical incidents 
 are dramatized, and community pageants are produced. The 
 pupils are made acquainted at first hand with the machinery of 
 the local government. They meet the policeman face to face, 
 and learn from his lips how they can co-operate with him in 
 the maintenance of laws and ordinances. Children are organ- 
 ized to keep streets and alleys clean, and to combat disease. 
 A few hours before these words were written, there passed under 
 my window a squad of children ("squad" is the name that they 
 
THE SOCIAL STANDPOINT 21 
 
 used for the group) all equipped with paraphernaha for removing 
 cocoons of the tussock moth from the shade-trees of a city. It 
 is significant of the educational organization of this campaign 
 that the squad was under the command of an elder pupil. 
 
 (6) It now becomes evident that if the basal process in educa- 
 tion is social interaction, the ancient isolation of school experience 
 from other experience must he overcome all along the line. This, 
 I take it, is the fundamental idea of a new type of boarding- 
 school that has appeared in the German and Swiss Landerzieh- 
 ungsheim, and in the Bedales School in England. Children, 
 both boys and gu'ls, ranging in age from the primary to the 
 mid-high-school grades, are placed in a country home under 
 conditions that reproduce as far as may be the life of a family 
 that supports itself upon the land. Here, in connection with the 
 traditional "studies," the pupils sow and reap, manage domestic 
 animals, construct and repair buildings, and make apparatus 
 for their games and plays, all in the continuous society of their 
 teachers. These groups are necessarily small, but the same 
 principle appears in the large public schools of Gary, where 
 pupils repair the furniture, keep the accounts, and even pay the 
 teachers. 
 
 The same principle is determinative of the subject-matter, 
 the order, and the use of the curriculum. The procedures 
 that have just been described have general approval because 
 they provide for social training through social experience. 
 But they are almost altogether outside the pupil's experience 
 of the contents of the curriculum' as something to be learned. 
 Can the curriculum, too, be brought under the head of social 
 experience, or must it, in the nature of things, remain, as it is 
 in most schools, a thing that contrasts with practice, a prelimi- 
 nary to social experience rather than a part of it ? The answer 
 has been given by Professor Dewey. Organized and stated in 
 my own way, it is this: 
 
 (1) The claim of any sort of knowledge or of skill to a place 
 in the curriculum mu^t meet the test of social fruitfulness. It must 
 be something that enriches the common life. The content of 
 instruction is to be drawn primarily from the area of social 
 
22 THE SOCIAL STANDPOINT 
 
 experience in the strict sense, that is, experience that men 
 have of one another, and specifically from experiences that 
 society has an interest in reproducing and developing. Sub- 
 ject-matter that is not thus directly social, as parts of mathe- 
 matics and of the physical sciences, is to be treated as social 
 in the sense of being a common interest of society. 
 
 (2) The '^knowledges'' and ''skills" thus selected are to be 
 taught in an order that is determined by the pupil's own growing 
 social needs and functions. In his relations within the family, 
 the play group, the school, the city, a child has from the be- 
 ginning problems of social adjustment, social efficiency, and 
 social reconstruction of his own. Grading the subject-matter 
 of instruction consists primarily in introducing him, in each of 
 these social situations, to the material that he can use and 
 enjoy. This genetic-social order cuts across and to some 
 extent supplants the old logical classification or linear arrange- 
 ment of studies (reading, arithmetic, history, etc.)- What has 
 to be mastered at each turn is a function or enterprise — a term 
 that applies equally to learning a trade, learning the duties of 
 a voter, and mastering the processes involved in playing at 
 storekeeping or with dolls. In the strict sense, the curriculum 
 is a succession of these enterprises, not a succession of " subjects 
 of instruction." These subjects will now come along in order 
 and amount as they are needed, and they will draw their vitality 
 as instruments of education from the fact that need for them 
 has arisen. 
 
 (3) Each piece of subject-matter is to be approached through a 
 motive that is, in this very act, in process of social growth. The 
 ideal is that no pupil should ever have a purely individualistic 
 attitude toward any item or toward the labor that is required 
 to master it. To develop self-centred individuality first, as 
 traditional methods tend to do, with the intention of subse- 
 quently transferring its strength to social enterprises, is a double 
 blunder. On the one hand, it tends to defeat its ultimate social 
 purpose by forming individualistic habits that are hard to break; 
 on the other hand, it makes no provision, or inadequate provi- 
 sion, for the growth of social purpose, but assumes that it can 
 
THE SOCIAL STANDPOINT 23 
 
 spring into being fully formed. The social approach to subject- 
 matter that is only indirectly social may be conveniently illus- 
 trated by one of the present approved methods of teaching 
 certain numerical processes. Instead of merely drilling the 
 pupil upon printed tables and imaginary problems, the play 
 of storekeeping is introduced, with its demand for measuring 
 and weighing, making change, and keeping accounts. 
 
 (4) All this means that the old separation between living and 
 preparing to live is to be done away with even in studies. The 
 separation is to disappear from the mind of both the pupil 
 and the society that educates him. Just as play, which is so 
 large a part of real life from the pupil's point of view, is being 
 incorporated also into the adult's interests, so, on the other 
 hand, the occupations of adults, and their civic ideals and enter- 
 prises, instead of being withheld from the pupil until he shall 
 in some mysterious way pass from education into life, now be- 
 come material of education, a sphere in which the child and his 
 seniors live an unbroken community life. In short, in their 
 entire life in the public schools, pupils are to be thought of as 
 simply fulfilling their functions as members of the State. 
 
 An important corollary, or more properly part, of this move- 
 ment to identify education with life, is the transformation that 
 is taking place in our notions of what constitutes a school. 
 We are beginning to see that a school is not a thing to be grad- 
 uated from and left behind. Within a mile or two of the desk 
 at which I wi-ite these words there are school buildings and 
 grounds at which the people provide for themselves the follow- 
 ing facilities for their common life: Evening classes in wood- 
 working and cookery; classes in citizenship for immigrants, 
 and a reception to new citizens upon their naturalization; free 
 baths for young and old; match games of baseball for the young 
 men; dancing-classes and dancing-parties under wholesome 
 supervision; a forum for political discussion; art exhibitions; 
 entertainments of various kinds, as on the evening of election 
 day, when the returns are received by a special wire. 
 
 A brief formulation of this theory of school organization, 
 methods, and curriculum is as follows: Social character and 
 
24 THE SOCIAL STANDPOINT 
 
 efficiency are to be achieved through social experience; social 
 experience is to be had primarily through the performance of 
 social functions, but it may be extended through imagination 
 in the use of well-selected and well-graded subject-matter 
 that represents the social experience of the race; school experi- 
 ence is most effective educationally when the pupil experiences 
 the least break between it and the life of the larger society. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SETTING OF THE NEW 
 SOCIAL IDEALS IN EDUCATION 
 
 The general relation of education to philosophy. The 
 
 tendencies to which the last chapter called attention may be 
 summed up as the social idea in education. Because of its 
 depth or comprehensiveness, this idea may be called philosophi- 
 cal, and as far as it controls educational practice we may say 
 that education is applied social philosophy. We do not stum- 
 ble any longer at the notion that life and philosophy may be 
 one. To the old saying that "Philosophy bakes no bread," 
 the reply is. What but philosophy can bake bread? Wheat 
 does not make itself into loaves; fire and oven are breadless 
 without the baker, and he is a baker because of the ideas that 
 guide his hands. These ideas, because they concern the ends 
 and means of living, represent, as far as they go, a philosophical 
 interest. To philosophize is to open one's eyes and gaze all 
 around the horizon so as to see whence and whither one's steps 
 are tending. Neither by its subject-matter, nor by its methods 
 of analysis, nor by any aloofness of aim is philosophical thinking 
 set off from any other. It is distinguished as philosophical by 
 its comprehensiveness, thoroughness, and persistence. 
 
 A glance at the setting of the movement for socializing educa- 
 tion will show that we are dealing with no split-off part of 
 thought or of social life, but with the whole moving social mass, 
 and with its growing awareness of the meaning of its own move- 
 ment. 
 
 The educational ideals that this generation inherited. 
 If the question "What is the ideal of modern education?" 
 had been asked thirty years ago, the most probable answer 
 would have been somewhat as follows : " The mark of moder- 
 
 25 
 
26 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SETTING 
 
 nity is recognition of education as falling within mental growth, 
 which proceeds from within outward by unfolding, not by accre- 
 tion. This implies that the freedom of the child is respected, 
 and that the great function of teaching is to assist him to ade- 
 quate free self-expression.'* If one had asked to see a dis- 
 tinctly modern school, a kindergarten would have been pointed 
 out, and the progressiveness of other schools would have been 
 measured chiefly by their responsiveness to the great message 
 of the movement that bore the name of Froebel. 
 
 In the ideal of freely unfolding individuality two closely 
 related influences are discernible, that of philosophical idealism 
 and that of the movement for popular government. On the 
 philosophical side the greatest single impulse came from 
 Kant. In his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781) he maintained 
 that mind does not come upon its world as something ready 
 made, but builds it forth out of mere raw materials of the senses. 
 We have a coherent world at all, it was said, only because we 
 impose upon these materials certain forms and categories that 
 are of the nature of our mind. Otherwise stated, the structure 
 of our mind is the organizing principle of any world that we 
 could possibly know. In a sense, then, the meaning of all 
 experience is preformed in us. Kant's great idealist successors, 
 Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, labored to show, each in his own 
 way, what this meaning is and how we become aware of it. 
 
 The educational corollary of this idealistic movement is 
 that we should not impose ready-made ideas or rules upon 
 the child mind, but rather provide conditions favorable for 
 spontaneous mental growth whereby what the child already 
 implicitly is will become explicit both as world-outlook and as 
 ethical self-guidance. Thus it was, in part, that teacher-wis- 
 dom took on forms like these: Adjust your procedure to the 
 child mind, not the child mind to some preconceived method 
 (hence the necessity of child study and of child psychology); 
 to teach is not to impart ideas, but to develop the ideas that 
 the pupil already has; no impression without expression; 
 we are not to mould the child, but to provide material for him 
 to mould; we learn by doing; utilize, do not repress, the child's 
 
THE PHILOSOPHICAL SETTING 27 
 
 curiosity, his imagination, and his impulses to play and to con- 
 struction; the end of the whole is not information or skill, but 
 a free personality at home in its world ; the ideal teacher is not 
 a taskmaster, much less a mechanic, but a friend, a revealer, a 
 protecting divinity. 
 
 We cannot stop to inquire what specific part Pestalozzi, 
 Froebel, and Herbart had respectively in making such educa- 
 tional ideas convincing, or in devising methods for applying 
 them. Nor is there space to show how far these ideas ever 
 prevailed in the schools. But the essentially religious pre- 
 suppositions that are here involved should be noted. Mind has 
 the primacy in the universe; experience has meaning that we 
 can discover, and even be a part of; duty is the voice of God. 
 Hence, if teaching becomes a prophetic office, none the less the 
 child himself becomes a "prophet of the soul.'* To the rever- 
 ence for their elders that had been demanded of children, the 
 nineteenth century added reverence of adults for childhood 
 itself. Every birth was a fresh incarnation of the ultimate 
 meaning that pervades things. To invade the personality of a 
 child was more heinous than to rob a householder of his goods. 
 
 The second great factor in this educational ideal is the 
 aspiration for political freedom that came to partial expres- 
 sion in the French Revolution and in the early stages of the 
 American experiment in popular government. Consider the 
 extraordinary value attributed to the individual by the Decla- 
 ration of Independence: Freedom is the natural right, the in- 
 alienable inheritance of every man; all just government de- 
 rives its powers from the consent of the governed. These 
 conceptions belong in the same thought-sphere as idealism, and 
 they reinforce its educational corollaries. Into the phases of 
 this reinforcement, from Rousseau's demand for education that 
 shall protect the child from social conventions to Horace Mann's 
 labor in behalf of schools for all the people controlled by all 
 the people, we are not permitted, in this discussion, to enter. 
 What characterizes the whole is insistence upon opportunity 
 for the individual, and emancipation for him. As far as the 
 schools were interested in good citizenship, it meant, pre- 
 
28 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SETTING 
 
 domlnantly, individual competency, particularly intellectual 
 competency, for the use of the ballot. 
 
 Why religious education has been slow to assimilate 
 the educational doctrines of the nineteenth century. At 
 the beginning of the present century we behold in religious 
 circles an awakening of educational consciousness that takes 
 the form, to a large extent, of self-criticism for the formalism 
 of religious teaching, and for its failure to appreciate growth 
 and free self-expression. Here was educational twilight after 
 a whole century of essentially religious ideals in educational 
 thinking. The explanation lies partly in the slowness of schools 
 and colleges generally to respond to the newer ideals. The 
 practical problems with which the present generation of educa- 
 tionists had to start were still those of a curriculum imposed 
 upon growing rninds rather than expressive of their growth, 
 and of formalism in method rather than free self-expression. 
 But the main reason for the backwardness of religious educa- 
 tion lies elsewhere, namely, in the control of ecclesiastical ma- 
 chinery by belief that the meaning of life was fully and authori- 
 tatively revealed in ancient times, so that the central function 
 of religious teaching is to pass on a completed, unchanging de- 
 posit of faith. It is true that in the latter half of the nine- 
 teenth century some attention was given to methods in the 
 Sunday school. Efforts to train teachers were by no means 
 altogether lacking. It is true, also, that in large ecclesiastical 
 areas the conscious aim of the Sunday schools was religious 
 life, not merely orthodox belief. Yet religious living was 
 prescribed, imposed, added to the child; under the ruling as- 
 sumptions, spiritual life could not be treated as a free forth- 
 living on his part. In Protestantism, then, as well as in 
 Catholicism, our century inherited a hiatus between appre- 
 ciation of free individuality and the content and the methods of 
 religious teaching. 
 
 How the ideals of the scientific movement modify the 
 notion of education. Regulated observation and experiment; 
 the resultant discovery of laws; new control of natural forces 
 as an end result — these are the marks of the scientific movement. 
 
THE PHILOSOPHICAL SETTING 29 
 
 Its progress during the nineteenth century constitutes perhaps 
 the most momentous, as it certainly does the most rapid, change 
 that has ever taken place in the method and the content of 
 thought. The already accomplished increase in man's control 
 of nature is astonishing; the possibilities that it suggests are 
 fascinating. But the scientific movement has bearings upon 
 the relations of man to man that are solemnizing, in some 
 cases terrifying, as when we contemplate the present industrial 
 conflict and the clash of nations. 
 
 The most obvious educational effects of the movement are 
 the introduction of various sciences into the curriculum, and 
 increase in the number and the thoroughness of technical courses 
 and of technical schools that have as their aim fitness for an 
 occupation. A cultivated individual, valued for what he is 
 in and of himself, is less and less the standard of educational 
 success. The purpose is shifting toward increase of human 
 efficiency. 
 
 The notion of efficiency or scientific control is modifying our 
 approach to educational processes as well as our ideals of cul- 
 ture. Psychology, having become an experimental science, is 
 bringing back into educational theory the concept of definite 
 control of pupil by teacher — not control in the old school- 
 masterish sense of command and compulsion, yet something 
 different from the "protecting divinity" attitude, which as- 
 sumes that the proper control for the child is already implicitly 
 within him, and in need of nothing but adequate encouragement 
 to self-expression. What psychology offers to-day is such in- 
 sight into details of the teaching process as teachers never 
 before possessed or dreamed of as possible. Just as agriculture 
 is moving from control by the traditional wisdom of generations 
 of farmers to "scientific farming," with its analysis of soils, 
 its tests of seeds, and its plant pathology, so the generalized, 
 largely incalculable, and partly intractable "human nature" 
 of school traditions is being replaced by measured relations of 
 antecedence and sequence. 
 
 We are beginning to control certain factors of inheritance 
 also. The upspringing of eugenics brings within sight a time 
 
30 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SETTING 
 
 when congenitally defective individuals, who produce the 
 least educable of children, will be estopped from reproduction, 
 and the better-endowed strains will deliberately control the 
 choice of mates, the number of offspring, the conditions of birth, 
 and the care of children, all in the interest of an improved human 
 stock. Thus education and eugenics, working together, will 
 place in somebody's hands unprecedented power over our 
 social destinies. A humanly guided development of racial 
 quality, and a humanly guided application of human energy 
 in the mass — foresight of these things must be included in any 
 comprehensive philosophy of education.^ 
 
 Scientific education requires a political philosophy. Scien- 
 tific control of nature, which is now an end in education, is 
 not separable from scientific control of men and of society. 
 It is true that when we arrange the parts of the universe in the 
 order of their significance or value, as when we rank them 
 under the category of means and end, we contrast man with 
 nature. But when we think of the world as an orderly proc- 
 ess, as when we ask under what conditions this or that change 
 occurs, we include man within nature and its laws just as we 
 include the winds and the clouds. Consequently, the sciences 
 of man, revealing the specific conditions of specific human acts, 
 become a means for controlling men, and scientific education 
 puts this control into the hands of specific members of society. 
 Mental hygiene and therapeutics, the psychology of advertis- 
 ing and of salesmanship, analysis of vocational aptitudes, the 
 movement for "scientific management," and various parts of 
 sociology — all are recent advances in this direction. 
 
 We are confronted, then, even as educationists, with the 
 question: In what part of society is control to be lodged? And 
 to what ends shall control be guided? By educational proce- 
 dures we can make an aristocratic or a democratic attitude 
 
 1 Control that approximates this already exists in Germany. Reproduction is 
 consciously guided, as respects the size of families, by a national ideal, and the 
 same ideal permeates education from top to bottom. Back of the amazing ef- 
 ficiency that the German nation has displayed in the present war is something 
 more than mihtary training and scientific organization of material resources; 
 there is also a mobilization of feeling and thought that was made possible by 
 previous regimentation of the mind by educational processes. 
 
THE PHILOSOPHICAL SETTING 31 
 
 toward one's fellows habitual. We can produce submissive- 
 ness or self-assertion. We can fix the assumptions of our 
 pupils' social thinking. The paramount question, therefore, 
 is this: What social likes and dislikes — that is, habits of feel- 
 ing with respect to the regulation of human life by human 
 beings — shall we cultivate ? For what kinds of authority shall 
 we secure respect? We should flatter our day and generation 
 unduly if we assumed that educational philosophy has kept pace 
 with the multiplying needs for reconstruction of our social 
 controls. Yet, all in all, the political philosophy that has the 
 greatest influence with American educationists looks forward 
 to democratic rather than aristocratic control of the resources 
 of both nature and man. That is, the trend is toward industrial 
 democracy. 
 
 • The educational significance of the doctrine of evolution. 
 The evolutionary view of nature, man included, has not only 
 provided fresh matter of instruction, it has also placed the whole 
 educational enterprise in a new perspective. 
 
 (1) ^ genetic view of the human mind has been achieved. 
 When Kant lectured upon the categories of the understanding, 
 or upon the pure practical reason, he referred to mind as he 
 thought he found it in himself, an adult human being. Such 
 was to him "the" human mind. He felt no necessity for 
 asking how it had acquired the traits that he attributed to 
 it. The moral imperative — to take the point in his thinking 
 that is of greatest social importance — could be understood, he 
 thought, by mere introspection, without reference to the moral 
 growth of the child, or to the moral development of the race. 
 But present thought is convinced that exactly the contrary is 
 the truth. We cannot understand the fact of a moral imperative 
 without examining the genesis and growth of the sense of duty. 
 Mental faculties, or better, processes, of whatever kind have a 
 history that connects the adult mind with the child, and the 
 human mind with animal minds of all grades. Therefore mental 
 beginnings and growth processes in both the human and the 
 subhuman realm become significant determiners of economical 
 educative processes. 
 
32 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SETTING 
 
 (2) The instincts acquire a fundamental 'place in educational 
 psychology. The older treatments of the learning or the teach- 
 ing process were occupied with perception, ideation, and reason- 
 ing; to-day we include as fundamental a mass of unlearned 
 tendencies to action, and also the constant influence of plea- 
 sures and pains. A teacher must now be ready to answer the 
 following question concerning each part of his dealing with 
 children: Upon what habits already formed, and upon what 
 original or instinctive tendencies do you rely for securing the 
 reaction that you desire the pupil to make? This question 
 applies in the same sense to the learning of arithmetic and the 
 learning of courtesy and upright conduct. 
 
 (3) The doctrine of evolution, which contemplates the indi- 
 vidual in his relations to a species, leads us to think of education 
 in terms of racial processes and of racial betterment. Individual- 
 istic notions tend to be crowded out of our minds even by our 
 attempts to follow nature. For the inclusion of education 
 within the notion of natural history looks both forward and back- 
 ward — backward from the human toward the brute, forward 
 from the brute toward the human, and from the human that 
 is toward that which may be. The idea of progress, it is true, 
 has no place in the definition of evolution as a mode of change. 
 Yet the actual history of life cannot be contemplated in its 
 entirety without seeing that progress does occur under natural 
 law. Each stage of this history has for us a forelook that gives 
 it poetic coloring. Says Emerson: 
 
 "And the poor worm shall plot and plan 
 What it will do when it is man." 
 
 Thus in its own way evolutionism reinforces idealism. If 
 from the natural-history point of view children belong to na- 
 ture, from the same point of view nature belongs to them. In 
 their education nature takes possession of herself and reaches 
 consciously toward goals that are only dimly foreshadowed in 
 prehuman species. Whether or not acquired characters can 
 be inherited, Davidson is right in regarding education as con- 
 
THE PHILOSOPHICAL SETTING 33 
 
 scious evolution.^ For, in the first place, eugenic control 
 of the stock through education concerning reproduction and 
 racial interests is already in sight, and in the second place, 
 education organizes and directs the actual use of the instincts, 
 which are so large a part of our mental inheritance.^ 
 
 The influence of industrial conditions upon educational 
 philosophy. Machine manufacture, the factory system, great 
 cities, steam and electric transportation, electric communica- 
 tion, the massing of capital, and mass movements of laborers — 
 these, joined with popular suffrage, have produced not only our 
 characteristic social strains, but also a type of social thinking 
 that is comprehensive enough to be called philosophical. 
 Those who say that our problem is to determine the place of 
 the human factor in industry do not go deep enough. We are 
 really working at the problem of the place of industries in human 
 life. Here the question that underlies all others is this: Shall 
 there be a permanent servile class ? 
 
 The outlook with respect to social stratification has immediate 
 and far-reaching educational bearings. The so-called laboring 
 classes have cherished the public schools largely as a means of 
 lifting their children above the necessity of manual labor, or 
 if possible out of the class of employees into that of employers. 
 On the other hand, industrial training in the schools, with its 
 correlate of vocational guidance, constitutes in effect the actual 
 predetermination of masses of children to manual pursuits and 
 the rank of employee. Labor leaders have been apprehensive 
 lest capital should secure control of industrial training, and 
 make it not only a means of supplying skilled labor, but also of 
 strengthening capitalistic control of the terms and conditions 
 of labor. 
 
 That the wage-workers carry an undue proportion of the 
 social burdens has become clear. The wage system itself is 
 competition in getting the most out of men for the least return. 
 Those who receive the least wage are the ones who bear the 
 heaviest burden of unemployment, industrial accidents and dis- 
 
 1 Thomas Davidson, History of Education (New York, 1901),. -' 
 » I shall deal more at large with this point in Chapter X./ 
 
34 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SETTING 
 
 eases, and the support of children and of the aged; and this 
 condition coexists with unprecedented fortunes amassed by 
 applying the labor of these very men to the freely given re- 
 sources of the earth. This situation is producing a demand 
 that the entire maintenance of the laborer and his family in 
 health and disease throughout life be included in the cost of 
 production, so that it shall be paid for by those who consume 
 the product. But the sense of justice, having gone thus far, 
 does not stop. Once take the point of view of a life in its whole- 
 ness, especially a life in which father, mother, and child count 
 as one, a life therefore that entails itself upon the future without 
 known limit — once take this point of view, and you will go on 
 to ask why the human factor in industries should not be the con- 
 trolling factor; why the conditions under which human energy 
 whether of hand or of brain is expended should not be determined 
 by those most immediately concerned ; whether all the producers 
 should not determine the distribution of all the product of their 
 joint expenditure; further, in view of the inextricable inter- 
 meshing of the industries with commerce, finance, and politics, 
 whether the whole economic mechanism must not be taken over 
 by organized society as an instrument of the common life. 
 
 When we commit ourselves to a genuine popular franchise 
 and to humanitarianism, we commit ourselves against social 
 stratification. Education, under such presuppositions, is bound 
 to undermine whatever makes for the permanence of a servile 
 class on the one hand, and a leisure class on the other. How- 
 ever long the road that leads to industrial democracy, popular 
 education has entered upon it and cannot turn back. 
 
 Educational bearings of the pragmatic movement in 
 philosophy. I shall assume that the reader has some familiar- 
 ity with the fresh philosophical doctrines called pragmatism. 
 It is a river into which four streams that are of immediate in- 
 terest to us have poured themselves. First, psychology, moving 
 away from intellectualism toward voluntarism, away from mind 
 as contemplation of a world to mind assisting in the struggle for 
 existence, provoked the question : Why, then, look for the con- 
 stitution of reality in intellectual structure? Why not look 
 
THE PHILOSOPHICAL SETTING 35 
 
 for it in the direction of will and action? Second, theology, 
 largely because of the results of historical study, found a shift 
 of position necessary. The shift was partly toward mysticism, 
 but far more toward an ethical grounding for faith. To this 
 the Ritschlian movement, which gave the first position to 
 value judgments, had already made a large contribution be- 
 fore pragmatism as an inclusive philosophy appeared. Third, 
 the scientific movement, emphasizing active experimentation 
 as the supreme method of discovery, and leading on to the 
 notion of indefinite extension of the control of nature in the 
 interest of human welfare, secures a completely generalized 
 expression in the pragmatic doctrine that the very notion 
 of truth is to be assimilated to that of active experimentation 
 and its results. Fourth, the fascination that an age of machin- 
 ery experiences in its unprecedented enterprises and in its 
 immense eflSciency crystallizes into the thought that life as a 
 whole is enterprise within a universe that contains nothing 
 eternally finished and final, but rather invites us to be part 
 creators of its flowing destiny. 
 
 Metaphysical idealism had bequeathed to educational phi- 
 losophy the notion of a predetermined human nature moving 
 toward an eternally predetermined goal, which is the same for 
 all individuals. Pragmatism reverses all this as far as possible. 
 It undertakes to carry out the notion of cosmic becoming, 
 plasticity, potentiality. The glory of human life, it teaches, 
 lies not in the faithful repetition of any prescribed program, 
 but in fresh impulses that have the vigor to test themselves in 
 action. 
 
 Some specific educational tendencies of this mode of thought '^ 
 may be formulated as follows : (1) Dissolution of the traditional 
 generalized ideal of the cultivated man. Each man is now 
 defined by his purposes and what comes of them. (2) Con- 
 sequently a drastic criticism of traditional curricula and 
 methods of teaching on the ground that they are removed 
 from the world's work, that they lack definiteness of purpose, 
 and that they are unable to develop the spirit of enterprise 
 or to test the results of it when it is present. (3) Demand 
 
 ^ 
 
36 THE PHILOSOPHICAL SETTING 
 
 for definite standards and tests of school efficiency. Measure- 
 ments in education are stimulated — measurements of the in- 
 go at every point in terms of space, time, dollars, and persons, 
 and of the outcome in terms of health, amount and accuracy 
 of work done, rate of improvement, extension of interests, and 
 persons equipped for specific functions in society. This in- 
 sistence that we shall know how costly and how efficient each 
 factor is tends to displace the notion that faithful teaching is 
 patient persistence in prescribed methods. (4) The unifica- 
 tion of the school with the enterprises of the community, 
 among which making one's living is frankly included. In a 
 farming population the old break between the school and the 
 farm will be done away with by bringing agriculture into the 
 school. A shoe-manufacturing community will be recogniza- 
 ble as such from its schools. This principle has many applica- 
 tions, some of which, especially those that involve conflict 
 between social ideals, are far from being easy. 
 
 The pragmatic movement takes as reality that which 
 works, or has positive results, satisfactory or otherwise. It 
 invites us to measure the world and men in these terms, and 
 to steer our further enterprises accordingly. But in view 
 of the multiplicity of satisfactions, the various levels of de- 
 sire from instinct upward, and the conflicts between under- 
 takings that are equally natural, some principle of discrimina- 
 tion is necessary. It does not appear that we guide ourselves 
 altogether by the satisfactions that we have found achievable 
 in the greatest amount and with the greatest certainty. Some 
 enterprises that achieve just what they go after, and are there- 
 fore successful from their own point of view, are nevertheless 
 regarded as in reality dismal failures. What pragmatism 
 might conceivably do with this "in reality" I shall not stop to 
 inquire. The query is raised merely for the sake of indicating 
 the chief difficulty in the pragmatic control of education, 
 namely, how to avoid a shallow pragmatism of immediate ends. 
 Pragmatists are in general convinced that social enterprises 
 and social satisfactions have validity that individualistic 
 ones do not. Thus far pragmatism reinforces the social 
 
THE PHILOSOPHICAL SETTING 37 
 
 philosophy that we have seen forming itself within the theory 
 of education. Moreover, the forward look of pragmatism, its 
 expectation of the unprecedented, its readiness to press onward 
 into the unknown, relate it closely to religious faith and to 
 the practical influence of idealism itself. 
 
 These various lines of thought converge toward social 
 idealism as a philosophy of life. The metaphysical ideal- 
 ism that underlay the educational aspirations of the last 
 century offered an inspiring view of human nature. Enfolded 
 in the personality, or coming to consciousness in human ex- 
 perience, was infinite reason, absolute moral law, the ultimate 
 good. Men shared in the very life of God. From such con- 
 victions there could but grow concern for common welfare, as 
 when, under the stimulus of Thomas Hill Green's teaching, 
 Arnold Toynbee started the social-settlement movement. 
 
 What happens to this reverential regard for man when em- 
 pirical science proclaims that there is continuity between him 
 and the brute ; when philosophy denies the existence of finished 
 and eternal principles in his mental structure; when man as 
 he is, not as he ought to be, has the franchise; when teeth and 
 stomach take seats at council tables where heretofore intellect 
 and conscience only had conferred together in solemn dignity; 
 and when education takes into its hands the grimy tools of 
 industry? What has already happened is an unprecedented 
 convergence of conviction that experience finds meaning, and 
 aspiration finds scope, in social welfare and social progress. 
 This is not the place for raising the question whether this con- 
 viction can be reached from so diverse starting-points by rigor- 
 ously logical processes. For our purpose it is enough to note 
 that attention, in so many types of reflection, does as a matter 
 of fact focus upon man as of supreme significance, and upon 
 social good as the one adequate sphere of man's endeavor. 
 Social idealism is the philosophy of life that prevails among 
 reflective persons, and it constitutes the corner-stone of pro- 
 gressive educational theory. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE PLACE OF THE INDIVIDUAL IN A SOCIALIZED 
 
 EDUCATION 
 
 Ambiguity of the terms "social" and "individual." 
 
 Shall we assume, even in our use of terms, that life can be- 
 come "individual'* without reference to society, or that "so- 
 ciety" implies of itself nothing as to individuality? Are the 
 two merely antithetical, or may they be complementary phases 
 of the same experience? The term social is sometimes applied 
 to mass action simply as such. In this sense of the term, 
 social action might be the blindest sort of conduct, and it 
 might have no regard for other human masses, or even for the 
 individuals who constitute the acting mass. On the other 
 hand, the term individual is sometimes used in a way that 
 suggests, if it does not assume, that individuality can be con- 
 strued without reference to any human interrelatedness. Yet 
 action might conceivably be most highly individualized pre- 
 cisely where it is most highly social, and because it is so. In- 
 dividual welfare might be individual just because it is shared. 
 For separatistic self-regard we already have a special term, 
 "individualistic," but we have no corresponding term for 
 mass action that disregards either individuals or other masses.^ 
 The crowd versus the deliberative group. When we 
 speak of the movement to socialize education we should under- 
 stand, not increase of mass action merely as such, but increase 
 of effective regard for one another — regard of individual for 
 individual, reciprocal regard of the individual for his group 
 and of his group for him, and regard of one group for another. 
 
 » I! Nationalism," however, is coming to mean something of the sort. 
 
 38 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL 39 
 
 Now, social living in this sense involves as a basic function in 
 education the disengaging of the individual from the mass, 
 both in the consciousness of the teacher and in that of the pupil. 
 Social education as such indimdualizes men. 
 
 It is sometimes assumed that if we only induce children to 
 act together in groups we shall thereby socialize them. To 
 forget oneself, and gladly to expend one's energy upon something 
 that brings no private profit has, in the statement of it, an ethical 
 sound. And the sound is not altogether misleading. When 
 a small child is allured beyond the solitary plays of infancy 
 into even the planless romping of an unorganized group of chil- 
 dren he unquestionably makes a social gain. It comes by the 
 way of simple mental contagion or imitation. But soon his 
 play, if it is to continue to be educational, will require some 
 planning, and especially "rules of the game'' and keeping the 
 score, all of which must develop in the players a sharper and 
 sharper realization of one another as individuals. Again, 
 adults as well as children find it wholesome to relax now and then 
 by "letting themselves go" for a while with some crowd that is 
 bent upon innocent enjoyment. But the complementary 
 truth is that in the background even of "letting go" there can 
 and should be some " choosing of our crowd," and some trained 
 tastes with respect to what constitutes fun. 
 
 Within mass action we must therefore discriminate two main 
 types, that of the crowd and that of the deliberative group. A 
 crowd is made up of persons who in the process of forgetting 
 self forget others also. What so heedless of individual welfare 
 as a mass that is consolidated by forgetting or failing to take 
 notice? What so incapable of appreciating other groups, and 
 therefore so ready for partisanship ? We observe this not only 
 in primitive society, but also close at home, as in the senseless, 
 lawless, sometimes cruel conduct of student crowds and school- 
 boy gangs. It is a trite remark of social psychology that with- 
 out any compunctions of conscience the members of a crowd 
 often conduct themselves as nothing would induce them to do 
 when they act singly. 
 
 In a deliberative group, on the other hand, mass action — 
 
40 THE INDIVIDUAL 
 
 so far is it from the crowd type — stimulates rather than sup- 
 presses reflectiveness and regard for others. In fact, we have 
 here mass action that arises and maintains itself precisely by 
 promoting individuality. This is seen most distinctly, perhaps, 
 in groups that have formal rules of order. Here, preliminary to 
 each common act, the entire mass "pauses, the chairman say- 
 ing: 'Are there any remarks?' Then, as if challenging each 
 individual to full self-expression, he asks: *Are you ready for 
 the motion?' This procedure has been devised so as to pre- 
 vent action under suggestion. Individual inhibitions are not 
 avoided or suppressed, but invited, spread out- for inspection, 
 often acted upon separately by dividing the question or by 
 voting upon proposed amendments."^ The same social prin- 
 ciple appears in many groups of a less formal character. Thus, 
 a kindergartner offers to retell the story that is best liked, 
 whereupon one child says: "I like this one best," and another 
 child: "I like that one." "How many Hke this one best?" 
 says the kindergartner, "And how many that one? Why do 
 you think it the best?" and then she acts according to the 
 deliberate preference of the majority. Similarly a recitation 
 can often take the form of a mass opinion of the deliberative 
 sort on what "we should do next." In this way classes are 
 led, in actual practice, to assign their own lessons and to agree 
 upon one another's proper grade. 
 
 Let it be noted, now, that children of school age act in crowds 
 without any assistance or training from their elders, but 
 that without such assistance the deliberative type of sociality 
 lags. The needs of the situation are not met by merely guiding 
 crowd action toward worthy ends — the group's mode of action 
 must be transformed into co-operative deliberation. There is 
 no security for worthy ends short of the habit of considering 
 others' points of view. Without such consideration party 
 government becomes tyrannical. Therefore, education for 
 society must consist in no small measure in replacing crowd 
 action, and susceptibility to crowd influences, by deliberative 
 
 1 1 have discussed these distinctions more at length in chap. VIII of The 
 Psychology of Religion (Chicago, 1916). 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL 41 
 
 / groupings and by habitual readiness for reflective co-opera- 
 
 Motive, as well as knowledge and skill, must become 
 a conscious possession of the pupil. A socialized education 
 will have four immediate aims: (1) That the pupil shall ac- 
 quire control of the tools and methods of social intercourse, 
 such as language, number, and various social forms and con- 
 ventions. (2) That he shall be favorably introduced to 
 society through happy acquaintance with the sciences, liter- 
 ature, and the arts, and through participation in the present 
 social life. (3) That he shall be trained for an occupation. 
 (4) That the motives of his conduct, that is, his own individually 
 appreciated and chosen ends, shall be intelligently socialized. 
 
 All four of these aims are included in the educational aspira- 
 tions of the day, but the putting of aspiration into articulated 
 theory and practice has not proceeded equally in the four 
 directions. The problem of scales of values, oi inmost loyalties, 
 _of life purposes — of this germinating centre of every growing 
 character — this is the educational problem that teachers are 
 taught least about, and it is the one with respect to which 
 their plans and methods are least definite and consistent. 
 Along with constant proclamation of the ethical or social pur- 
 pose of the schools there goes disagreement, as well as much hazi- 
 ness, as to the particular ends and processes of moral education. 
 In practice there are corresponding hesitation, delay, frag- 
 mentariness, and opposition of methods. Some phases of the 
 problem of "direct or indirect'' methods in moral education 
 must be postponed to a later chapter. But we cannot complete 
 our present sketch of the social conception of education without 
 a preliminary statement upon the point. 
 
 The social aim in education includes the purpose to produce 
 individual self -guidance toward the social good. Now, such 
 self-guidance implies both knowledge of social causes and 
 effects, and preference for certain effects as against others. 
 Preference for social good implies resistance to natural, in- 
 stinctive selfishness. How, then, can we train children to open- 
 eyed social conduct unless we train them in social motives or 
 
42 THE INDIVIDUAL 
 
 preferences; and how can there be discrimination of social 
 ends unless one thinks about one's own relation to the social 
 whole and recognizes one's own tendencies to selfishness? 
 Self-conquest is an inevitable phase of social education. 
 
 This point of view implies, of course, that the ethically 
 good has some reference to the consequences of conduct. Ethi- 
 cal theories that deny this, holding that duty and the good will 
 are something in themselves regardless of satisfactions of any 
 sort, or that the goodness of an act is measurable by some 
 quality of the impulse whence it springs — a quality that can 
 be defined without any reference to the foreseen results of the 
 act — are largely responsible for the confusion that prevails in 
 educational thinking and practice with respect to moral growth. 
 Though these types of ethical philosophy are generally giving 
 way before others that define the good, and duty, and the good 
 will in terms of social satisfactions and social progress, the 
 educational significance of the change has not fully dawned 
 upon the schools. We may sum up the matter by saying that 
 the pupil must be led to form conscious life purposes, not by 
 comparing himself with some abstract ideal of duty or of per- 
 fection, but by considering the consequences of conduct, espe- 
 cially in the welfare or illfare of others. 
 
 The educational use of rules and of authority. What has 
 just been said gives us a clew to the proper and the improper 
 use of rules and of authority in the school. At least four theories 
 of the matter exist in various mixtures : (1) Rules are necessary 
 because a school cannot do its work without them. True; 
 but how did the teacher become competent to prescribe rules, 
 and how shall these children in their turn be worthy to control 
 the system of education? Parental authority, it is often said, 
 should be so exercised as to make itself unnecessary in the life 
 of the child as early as possible. Does not the same principle 
 - apply to schools ? (2) We know what is good for children 
 better than they can know; therefore we prescribe for them. 
 No doubt we do know better; but wouldn't it be worth while 
 to bring them up so that they will ultimately know even better 
 than we do what is good for children ? If so, what about simply 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL 43 
 
 imposing our present ideas ? (3) Human experience has settled 
 some things, and to these the children simply must conform. 
 Let us have no ifs or ands here, especially a child's. Yes, we 
 have learned some things by experience. But does it seem 
 likely that a child can learn them by the utterly different sort 
 of experience that the mere enforcement of rules brings him? 
 How are you to make him see and know that the foundations 
 of existing social customs and institutions are sound? And if 
 he does not see, but instead is confronted with what seems to 
 him to be mere power, what is likely to happen? (4) Some 
 things are eternally right, and they simply must be. But is 
 the eternally right actually realized in anything short of the 
 free loyalty of the heart? Moreover, who determines what is 
 eternally right ? Do you maintain that capacity for apprehend- 
 ing it has disappeared from the earth never to return? Do 
 you hold that this capacity belongs to one class or set of individ- 
 uals exclusively? 
 
 Unless we intend to have a permanent cleft in society be- 
 tween those who command and those who obey, we must, 
 it is now evident, so employ rules and authority that they 
 shall be continuously passing into something else as the child 
 grows. The primary function of some rules, as those that con- 
 cern firearms and explosives, may be simply protection of life. 
 But the educational use of any rule lies essentially in furnishing 
 the conditions that are most favorable for deliberative group 
 action. What is required in one case may be postponement of 
 action until reflection can set in, or until other individuals can 
 be heard from. In other cases rules and authority may so 
 dispose satisfactions and dissatisfactions that difficult social 
 conduct is made easier and unsocial conduct less easy. This 
 is not an approval of either anarchy or the sugar-coating of duty 
 so as ta conceal its real nature. What is here insisted upon is 
 that pupils shall be able as individuals to find present social 
 meaning and value in their contacts with society in the person 
 of the teacher. Whatever confronts the child at first as a sheer 
 necessity (the occasions for which are far less frequent than we 
 ordinarily suppose) must, even as he faces it, melt into stimulus 
 
44 THE INDIVIDUAL 
 
 to the use of his own judgment in ways that are social and 
 pleasurable.^ 
 A social interpretation of the sacredness of personality. 
 
 Something fine, and in its way social, is represented in the 
 phrase, "the sacredness of personality." It means at least 
 this, that we are to place some checks upon our conduct sim- 
 ply because other persons are affected by it. But the "sacred" 
 or "set apart" may be more or less closely related to taboo. 
 Does an exalted view of the rights of persons imply that there 
 is in each individual something that belongs to him in such an 
 exclusive sense that it ought to be kept to himself, forever un- 
 shared? Shall we not hold, rather, that personality is sacred 
 precisely because in free individuality, and in it alone, can soci- 
 ety fully realize itself ? Personality is sacred, not from society, 
 but to society. Therefore nothing over which the individual has 
 control is to remain unshared. There is to be no purely private 
 affair.2 Society, if it is wise, will, indeed, encourage individual 
 initiative, and also the reticence that keeps the common good 
 in the foreground, and not-yet-socialized impulse in the back- 
 ground. Moreover, intimacies that only a few can share, 
 as in the family, will be encouraged, but only as far as their own 
 happy realization makes also for the wider social good. The 
 right of private property will be understood, not as a natural 
 right with which one's fellows must not interfere, but as an in- 
 strument of society for the nourishment and education of its 
 members, particularly in families. 
 
 The educational applications of this conception of person- 
 ality are direct and vital. First, it tends to take officialism 
 
 1 On the playground of a certain elementary school the penalty for foul 
 playing and for lying is a week's exclusion from the plays. But the whole 
 management of the playground is such that even this drastic rule expresses 
 the social consciousness of the players. Result: Remarkable objectivity 
 of judgment concerning both one's own play and that of others, gentlemanly 
 acceptance of one another's word, correct scoring, and relative absence of dis- 
 putes. I have witnessed true sportsmanship, and unclouded happiness in it, 
 among boys of eight and nine years who were thus privileged. 
 
 2 The evils of self-involution have been made strikingly evident by various 
 branches of the psychotherapeutic movement. Merely to open one's whole 
 mind to another, whether physician or priest, often brings relief, inner eman- 
 cipation, and fresh social capacities. 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL ' 45 
 
 out of the pupil-teacher relation, as it does also out of parental 
 government. Only a part of the teacher's business can be put 
 into a schedule of specific tasks to be performed, such as sub- 
 jects to be taught with this or that degree of efficiency. No 
 interest of a pupil or phase of his life is foreign to the true 
 teacher, for everything in every child — everything — is sacred to 
 society. On the other hand, everything in the teacher also is 
 sacred, and therefore to be shared in due season. The teacher 
 and the man are not two. The teacher-pupil relation is that 
 of reciprocal self-realization by the sharing of experience. 
 Happy the teachers — there are many of them — who through 
 their occupation have obtained not only a living but also life ! 
 
 Education, being an agency of justice, looks beyond 
 social averages. In the juvenile court, as we saw, justice to 
 the offending child takes the form of education. Why should 
 this be considered exceptional? Is not education as a whole 
 the bringing home to each child of what is his due in view of ^ 
 the upbinding of his life with that of his fellows? Therefore 
 the exceptional child, whether a backward pupil or an unusually 
 gifted one, is entitled to exceptional teaching. In the end this 
 will mean, of course, adaptation to every individual, and 
 therefore important modifications of class teaching. We 
 shall thus discover that talent exists in certain "classes" of 
 the population in greater measure, and in other "classes" in 
 smaller measure, than has been supposed. Education will 
 discover favorable variations, and bring them to social fruitage. 
 Enormous social waste exists at present because individual 
 talent goes undiscovered through childhood, and then is 
 smothered by too early entrance into the industries. And 
 there is ground for more than a suspicion that the students 
 who attend our institutions of higher education, where the 
 expenditure per pupil is highest, are not being selected for this 
 post out of the whole people by rigorous demonstration either 
 of superior talent or of superior social spirit in the use of talents.^ 
 
 1 Emancipation of the schools from the fallacy of social averages would 
 help to rid us of it in other directions. What is the social significance of such 
 statements as that the average wealth of the United States is so or so much 
 per person ? Or that the average wage in a given industry or industrial estab- 
 
46 THE INDIVIDUAL 
 
 Shall the individual exist for the state ? The concept of 
 national efficiency, which the present war has brought to our 
 attention with unprecedented force, is a challenge to educa- 
 tional theory and practice in every land that boasts the free- 
 dom of its citizens. Can efficiency of the mass be achieved by 
 education that disengages the individual consciousness, and 
 puts it into the attitude of mutual deliberation? Must not 
 national policies be settled long before the people can arrive 
 at a deliberate social judgment? Must not minorities be 
 ignored and even repressed lest they draft off energy from the 
 main purpose? Must not even majorities be circumvented 
 at times because they are clumsy and not overwise ? In short, 
 does not national efficiency ultimately depend upon applying 
 human energy approximately after the manner of a machine? 
 Will not the advantage always be on the side of a mechanized 
 group as against any group in which the members have ideas of 
 their own and a will of their own with respect to the work that 
 they do ? 
 
 Thoughts like these, which are now in the air, put in jeopardy 
 what is most vital to our educational progress. If national 
 and international groupings are not to be of the deliberative 
 type; if society is to consist, even for a part of the time, of masses 
 of men regimented in body and mind, the result will be that in 
 times of excitement, when deliberation is most necessary, the 
 group will become a mere crowd with its impetuous and ruth- 
 less mode of action. This view of national efficiency implies, 
 of course, corresponding regimentation within the industries. 
 Signs are not lacking that this implication is at least partly 
 understood by some of the "captains of industry." They 
 
 lishment is so or so much per piece, per hour, or per day ? Or that the general 
 level of wages has risen a certain amount in a given period ? An industrial 
 commission recently listened to an argument for seven-day labor in a certain 
 steel-mill on the ground that the average time ofif is, or will be, as much 
 as one day in seven anyway. Shall we base a minimum wage for men upon 
 the average family, or for women upon the average cost of decent Uving for 
 a woman upon whom no one is dependent ? There is no room for doubt that 
 we are concealing social truth from ourselves by thinking of mankind as 
 made up of masses, classes, and averages. The average man, or pupil, or 
 welfare, is a mental construct of statisticians. To govern education or the 
 conditions of social welfare by mere averages is to render oiu* dealings with 
 actual men and actual pupils more or less fictitious and unjust. 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL 47 
 
 should reflect that regimentation of labor means ultimately 
 crowd action by laborers. 
 
 It is possible to cling to the semblance of freedom when the 
 soul of it has departed. Not all submission is irksome. The 
 members of any crowd feel emancipated when unreflective 
 contagion is at its height; at the moment when a designing 
 leader makes tools of them, they imagine that he leads by 
 virtue of their free choice. This is the pseudofreedom of 
 irresponsibility. It may easily seem preferable to the birth- 
 pangs of real liberty. Let us not be blind to the possibility 
 that, under the influence of some nation-wide emotion, our 
 public schools, instead of going steadily forward toward de- 
 mocracy, which must be deliberative, may be made instruments 
 for fastening upon the people one or another class control 
 concealed under such specious concepts as efficiency, patriot- 
 ism, and self-sacrifice.^ 
 
 The cost of a socialized education. We have reached 
 the conclusion that socialized education, precisely because it 
 is social, must be individualized. The alternatives that have 
 to be considered are not "social vs. individual," but "social vs. 
 individualistic," and "society vs. a class within itself." In- 
 
 1 Do we realize the import, as respects our liberties, of the recent merciless 
 hazing of militiamen to compel them to enter the military service of the 
 United States, the hazers and the hazed both being mider miUtary command 
 at the time ? In the free land to the north of us a newspaper was suspended 
 by military order because of an editorial opinion that Canada had already 
 furnished her proper quota of soldiers for the European war, and that en- 
 listments should cease. In the same land a recruiting officer may accost 
 a citizen upon the streets, and tease him any number of times, but if a citizen 
 repUes disrespectfully he subjects himself to legal penalties. It is a fair 
 question whether war can be engaged in by any free people without sacrifice of 
 liberty within its own borders. For, must not miUtary control extend not 
 only to industries and to consumption, but also to communication between 
 men, which is a fundamental process in any popvilar government ? Is it not of 
 the essence of war to repress criticism of military acts and poUcies ? Repres- 
 sion begins by egging on those who are willing to hm-l disrespectful epithets 
 at their fellow citizens. This of itself interferes with conditions that are 
 necessary to the life of a deliberative group. But this informal censorship, 
 which is of the crowd type, is crowned by a legaUzed censorship which, what- 
 ever its conscious purpose, has the effect of party government maintaining 
 its policies and perpetuating its control by force. The inference to be drawn 
 from this is that government by the people has a vital interest in discovering 
 some way to end war forever. There will be no security for democracy until 
 peace is assured. This^truth has educational consequences the full considera- 
 tion of which must be postponed to another chapter. 
 
48 THE INDIVIDUAL 
 
 dlvidualistlc education need not be costly, but individualized 
 education must be. For, first, It will require educational diag- 
 nosis, and educational adaptation, with respect to each pupil, 
 and therefore a larger budget; second, it will undertake the hard- 
 est of educational tasks, which is the production of self-sacrifice, 
 and therefore will call for the highest training of teachers; 
 third, it will make the new generation discontented with the 
 social-economic order. Let us consider for a moment the third 
 of these items, and In a subsequent paragraph return to the 
 second. 
 
 To make children deliberately social implies In the first place 
 that impulsive good-heartedness must be transformed into 
 steady, reflective good-will. It implies, further, that mere 
 rules of conduct toward others, as giving money or goods to the 
 unfortunate, are to be supplemented by a habit of reflection 
 upon the situation of others as Individuals, that is, a habit of 
 putting oneself in their place. This will lead straight to the 
 question, Why should their situation be what It Is ? Why need 
 there be poverty ? Why^ is there so much sickness ? Is there 
 sufficient knowledge, and are there anywhere sufficient re- 
 sources to remove in any large measure the causes of poverty 
 and of disease? If so, why are not knowledge and resources 
 applied to these primary human necessities? What is it that 
 stands in the way of the widest distribution of human welfare ? 
 
 When we teach the young to think socially they will not re- 
 gard social classes and economic class conditions as naturally 
 predetermined and static, but rather as a sphere for the de- 
 liberate justice that values human life supremely, and that 
 values things and even rights only as they actually minister to 
 life. Moreover, such teaching, with its tendency to produce 
 deliberative group action, will lead the inheritors and the dis- 
 inherited to sit together In calm judgment upon the justice of 
 their respective situations, and upon the possibility of a more 
 ,just, that is to say humane, distribution of opportunities for 
 adequate living. 
 
 The result is bound to be discontent with the existing social 
 order. It is futile to think that any effective teaching of de- 
 
THE INDIVIDUAL 49 
 
 mocracy, or of the supreme value of human Hfe, will leave un- 
 challenged the present control which a few exercise over the 
 conditions of life — mental and moral as well as bodily life — of 
 the many. The outcome must be, not alone increased doing 
 for others, but also surrender into their own hands of the means 
 to do for themselves. Not less than this will be the cost of a 
 really socialized education. 
 
 Consequences with respect to the theory of interest. 
 The doctrine of interest in education, stated most generally, 
 runs to the effect that the material of instruction must be 
 chosen and graded, and methods of teaching devised, so that 
 the activities of the pupil in the learning process will produce 
 spontaneous pleasure, and therefore be performed from free 
 internal impulsion rather than from external pressure emanating 
 from the teacher. The pupil is not to be driven, but led; and 
 he is not to be led by any and everything but by the inherent 
 value of the material or of the enterprise from his own 
 point of view. At first sight this may seem to imply "soft 
 pedagogy," which follows the whims of the child, letting him 
 do what he likes instead of seeing that he does what is good 
 for him. This would be the consequence if children were shut 
 up by nature to a single interest at each period of time. But 
 as a matter of fact diversity and mobility of interest are prime 
 characteristics of childhood. The educator always has several 
 possible interests between w^hich to choose, and therefore it is 
 possible to feed one repeatedly while allowing another to 
 atrophy from lack of exercise. This is not the same as following 
 a child's whims, nor is it equivalent to indulging him in doing 
 what is easy and avoiding what is hard. On the contrary, the 
 theory of interest requires us to put before the pupil what is 
 inherently so attractive that he will work hard with a feeling 
 that the enterprise belongs to him as a part of himself. This 
 individualizing of what one is doing as one's very own is essen- 
 tially what we mean by interest. 
 
 In point of technic the first requirement for social education 
 is socialization of the habitual interests of the pupil with re- 
 spect to his school work. This implies, first of all, choosing 
 
50 THE INDIVIDUAL 
 
 material of instruction and arranging the conditions of school 
 life so that instinctive social satisfactions shall be the basal 
 ones. But this is not all. The pupil must be helped to ad- 
 vance beyond the unreflectlve level of instinct. He must be 
 led up to the point of self-denial. He must be Initiated into the 
 great paradox of personality, which Is, ability, after facing an 
 easier and a harder alternative, to choose the harder as one's 
 very own, and thus determine where one's satisfactions shall 
 He. The social way is not that of smug self-security through 
 canny control of others, but of self-sacrifice for them. We shall 
 never stabilize human relations by playing off one selfish in- 
 terest against another, but only by freely sacrificing selfish 
 interest, only by taking into one's individual will the very thing 
 that opposes it. 
 
 Here is where the teacher's view of interest in education 
 will meet its severest test. Shall the last appeal to the pupil 
 be addressed to selfish interest, or to unselfish ? Can the teacher 
 reveal in his own conduct, and demonstrate to the pupils by 
 their own guided experiments in living, that to live we must 
 lose our individualistic life ? 
 
PART II 
 
 THE SOCIAL INTERPRETATION 
 
 OF CHRISTIANITY REQUIRES SOCIAL 
 
 RECONSTRUCTION IN RELIGIOUS 
 
 EDUCATION 
 
CHAPTER V 
 THE AIMS OF CHRISTIAN EDUCATION 
 
 Traditions as to the aim of Christian education. The 
 
 aim has been conceived in all of the following ways: 
 
 (1) That the purpose is to instruct the child in the things 
 that a Christian ought to know. Back of this purpose lies an 
 assumption that our religion consists primarily of a completed, 
 authoritative revelation concerning God and duty that needs 
 merely to be handed down from generation to generation. 
 
 (2) That the purpose is to prepare the child for full member- *' 
 ship iri the church. This definition rests upon such assump- 
 tions as that the church is the authoritative expositor and ad- 
 ministrator of the fixed revelation just referred to, or that the 
 will of God is to be done on earth by drawing men into a par- 
 ticular society of the saved. 
 
 (3) That the purpose is to save the child's soul here and here- 
 after. Behind this lie the dogmas of depravity, guilt, and re- 
 demption out of the world as distinguished from redemption of 
 the world. 
 
 (4) That the purpose is unfoldment of religious capacities,- 
 or of a germinal di\ane life, already within the individual. 
 Here we witness the influence of idealism, with its doctrine of 
 the eternal within the temporal, the infinite in the finite, and 
 with its maxims regarding free self-expression. 
 
 (5) That the purpose is the production of Christian char- ■ 
 acter. This may mean any one of several different things 
 according to the view that is taken of "Christian character." 
 In the statement as it stands there is, for example, no discrimi- 
 nation between the notion of a merely individual goodness or 
 merely individual relation to God, on the one hand, and the 
 
 53 
 
64 THE AIMS 
 
 contradictory view that genuine goodness can never be merely 
 individual and that the Christian God permits no merely in- 
 dividual reconciliation with him. 
 
 Without denying that in each of these aims there is some- 
 thing that is worthy of permanence, we may assert that they do 
 not, either singly or collectively, do justice to the social ideal- 
 ism that characterizes the most vigorous Christian thought of 
 the day. 
 
 The ideal of a democracy of God as the determinant of 
 ultimate ends. I use the term "democracy of God*' in place 
 of "kingdom of God," not because I desire to substitute a new 
 social principle for that which Jesus taught, but because the 
 idea of democracy is essential to full appreciation of his teach- 
 ing. After making all needful allowances for the influence of 
 contemporary political and religious conditions upon his modes 
 of speech and the content of his thought — allowances that are 
 to be determined by New Testament criticism — the fact re- 
 mains that his desire for a brotherhood of men leads on with 
 the inevitableness of fate to the ideal of a democratic organiza- 
 tion of human society, and that his fusion of divine with human 
 love presents us with a divine-human democracy as a final 
 social ideal. 
 
 Without doubt this view of the Christian life has been hast- 
 ened by our experiments in popular government, and by our 
 experience of social strains connected with the new economic 
 order. These modern factors have contributed to Christian 
 thought partly by challenging social conditions and assump- 
 tions that had been accepted by Christian teaching as the very 
 sphere in which the Christian life is to be lived. Instead of 
 being a Christian within these limitations, we are asked why we 
 should not remove the limitations. The virtue of feeding the 
 hungry, for example, loses something of its impressiveness un- 
 less it is combined with determination to find and remove the 
 causes of poverty. A re-examination of prophetism, the teach- 
 ings of Jesus included, has made it clear that thinking upon 
 ethical problems, and upon the will of God, in terms of social 
 causes and effects belongs within Christian teaching; it is not 
 
THE AIMS 55 
 
 merely a modern accretion or fashion. On the other hand, mod- 
 ern conditions have helped to reveal the mind of Christ by dis- 
 pla^'ing more significant outlets for the ancient sentiment of 
 brotherly love. When the business relations of most men were 
 limited to a small circle of neighbors, good will seemed, naturally 
 enough, to find its circumference in the misfortunes that fell 
 under one's own eye. But the enlargement of our social horizon 
 by the enormous increase of human intercourse, together with 
 the realization that a man's ballot counts simply because he is a 
 man, reflects itself in a vast enlargement of meaning in the 
 command that we love our neighbors as ourselves. 
 
 Therefore such questions as the following are becoming a prime "V 
 concern of Christian tliought: If one human life outweighs a \ 
 world, as Jesus taught, what should we do with a social order j 
 that stunts multitudes of human lives for the sake of money, 
 and does it, not by disobedience to the laws of the state, but 
 under the protection of laws and of courts ? How can we really 
 believe in human brotherhood if we are willing to acquiesce in 
 a stratification of society into the servers and the served, the 
 rulers and the ruled? Moreover, if brotherly love is, as our 
 religion has always taught, the carrying out of the Father's 
 loving will in human relations, how can the Father himself be 
 willing to be an autocrat, an aristocrat, or a plutocrat? Must 
 not Christians think of God as being within human society 
 in the democratic manner of working, helping, sacrificing, per- 
 suading, co-operating, achieving? "My Father worketh even 
 until now, and I work." Divine love, it appears, cannot ^realize 
 itself anywhere but in a genuine industrial democracy. 
 
 Granted this social idealism as the interpretation of the 
 life that now is, the aim of Christian education becomes 
 this : Growth of the young toward and into mature and efficient 
 devotion to the democracy of God, a7id happy self-realization 
 therein. 
 
 The aim is growth because there is now no separation be- 
 tween human society and divine, and because the rudimentary 
 conditions of human society are already provided for in our 
 social instincts. 
 
56 THE AIMS 
 
 The aim is devotion to a cause, not the attainment of a status. 
 Whoever thinks that Christian education has achieved its 
 main end with any pupil when it has led him to cross a line 
 that separates the saved from the unsaved — whoever thinks 
 this misses the meaning of love. Love is active, outgoing. 
 The lover accepts no security that does not include his loved 
 ones. 
 
 Moreover, because the aim is active devotion, Christian edu- 
 cation does not consist primarily in the transference of a set of 
 ideas from one generation to another, but rather in the cultiva- 
 tion of intelligent will. When our will is in accord with the 
 loving purpose of God, we have the good heart, the life that 
 is from above. 
 
 Though the goodness of such a will must be measured by its 
 intent rather than by its power, the only test for the Christian 
 education of the will lies in increase of the social efficiency of our 
 pupils. There can be no successful Christian education that 
 does not increase the amount of effective, not merely senti- 
 mental, brotherhood in the world. 
 
 Efficiency in achieving these ends must be measured by con- 
 crete evidence such as health, food, laws, ballot-boxes, homes, 
 streets, schools, happy children, and happy husbands and wives. 
 Patience or any other virtue on a pedestal is unconvincing. ^' 
 
 In and through his growing participation in the creation of 
 an ideal society the pupil will realize his fellowship with the 
 Father. Not by release from toil or from the turmoil of social 
 endeavor, not by any retirement within himself as an individual, 
 will the growing child achieve a mature Christian experience, 
 but only by doing God's social will even to the point of suffering 
 with him.^ 
 
 In this losing of his individualism the pupil will gain life. He 
 will gain it, not in the ascetic sense of despising satisfactions, 
 
 * This does not deny all value to times of retirement. When they are 
 not a method of evading or forgetting the issue, but of gathering up one's 
 powers to meet it, they are as Christian as hours of active labor. Moreover, 
 eesthetic contemplation of nature or of art is a fitting thing for a child of God 
 whenever it does not separate itself from the purpose of putting all of God's 
 children into possession of their proper eesthetic heritage. 
 
THE AIMS 57 
 
 not in the mystical sense of denying value to the individual, 
 but in the social sense of individual satisfactions that are height- 
 ened because they are shared. Everything that is worth while, 
 from health to good music, from play to scientific learning, 
 from food to friendship, will be most worth while when the dis- 
 tribution of it is most wide. Here will be found Christian peace 
 because feverish calculation of benefits to one's little self has 
 ceased. Here will grow Christian joy in a fellowship of endeavor 
 so profound that it can rejoice even in tribulation. Here hope 
 lifts up its head unabashed by the vastness of time and the 
 tragic frailty of life. This is the life of faith, which is the iden- 
 tification of one's very self with ideal good. 
 
 Social issues of the present as determiners of the end. 
 When we ask a Sunday-school teacher what he is trying to 
 accomplish with his class, the reply that we commonly receive 
 is that he is endeavoring to make his pupils Christians. But 
 if we examine the text-book that is in use, or listen to the con- 
 versation between teacher and pupil during the class session, 
 or observe the general exercises of the school, how much con- 
 sciousness do we find of the concrete situations wherein lie the 
 issues of to-day between the love of the Father and the love of 
 the world? In most cases we behold an effort to make pupils 
 Christians in a general, unfocalized sense, which is almost 
 certain to encourage a private, ineffective sort of goodness. 
 The expression of this goodness in palliative benevolence may 
 even beget self-deception as to the Christian quality of one's 
 character. Softening the inhumane results of an unjust social 
 order can partially, but not adequately, represent the Christian 
 purpose. Let us teach pupils to respond heartily to the call of 
 distress, but let us not lull them into spiritual slumber by rep- 
 resenting charitableness as the luxury of the good. 
 
 We must reveal the terrible meaning of love. Suppose that 
 parental love should suddenly acquire power to deal as it likes 
 with everything that blasts or stunts the life of offspring; sup- 
 pose that wives and husbands could deal as love would dictate 
 with every human condition that tends to break up the happi- 
 ness of families; suppose that a neighbor could do as a neigh- 
 
58 THE AIMS 
 
 bor would like to do with everything that injures one's neigh- 
 bor; suppose that welfare workers could control the causes of 
 illfare; suppose that every business and business method, every 
 law, all civil and criminal administration were to be halted 
 until it could prove that it is an expression of human good 
 will; suppose that love in all these relations should suddenly 
 insist upon having its way — ^what wreckage of our social as- 
 sumptions and standards should we witness ! Religious educa- 
 tion must bring to the light, discredit, undermine, attack, these 
 assumptions and standards. It must be clear in its own mind 
 that the vocation of the Christian is not to be as benevolent 
 as an unbenevolent occupation permits, but also to re-create 
 the social system that tends to restrict the sphere of good will 
 1 in his daily occupation. The social issues of the present, then, 
 • must be taken as the call of God to our pupils, and as the sphere 
 of entire consecration to the will of God. 
 
 These issues may be conveniently classified under three heads: 
 
 (1) Social welfare, which has to do with the control of the 
 non-human environment in the interest of human life. Here 
 belong relief work of every kind; the fight against disease, 
 especially at the present moment against tuberculosis, syphilis, 
 and gonorrhea; the fight against the saloon; the struggle for 
 proper housing; for adequate wages ; for good conditions of 
 labor; for short hours of labor; for provision against accidents, 
 illness, unemployment, and old age, and for facilities for cul- 
 ture and for recreation. 
 
 (2) Social justice, which has to do with each man as a factor 
 in the life of some other man. Justice to the child means the 
 abolition of child labor, provision for the best education, pro- 
 vision for play, and protection from unwholesome influences. 
 Justice as respects family relations implies a life-and-death 
 fight against the disintegrating influences that are all too evi- 
 dent. Justice to the citizen requires that he be enfranchised 
 in fact and not merely in form, and that partisanship and civic 
 corruption, both of which circumvent and depress the franchise, 
 be overcome. Justice with respect to the criminal requires 
 that society shall requite his evil with good — the good of oppor- 
 
THE AIMS 59 
 
 tunity for a better life and help toward it — and that the mak- 
 ing of criminals by social forces shall stop. Justice to each man 
 as a man commands that we find ways to rebuild our indus- 
 trial and economic system, which at present invites each man 
 to grab what he can of the free gifts of nature, and then to 
 grab what he can of the products of other men's toil. A 
 brotherly economic order will be vastly different from regu- 
 lated grabbing, mere selfishness made respectable by rules 
 of moderation; it will be nothing less than love employing law 
 as a means for securing the maximum benefit of every person 
 in the industrial commonwealth. 
 
 (3) ^ world society, or the regulation of the conduct of each 
 social group with respect to other groups in such a way as to 
 promote the integration of all mankind into a single, demo- 
 cratically governed brotherhood. What justice requires from 
 each individual in his relations with his neighbor is required 
 also from each nation in its relations with other nations. The 
 idea of the sovereignty, that is to say the irresponsibility, of 
 the state may possibly represent a stage in the social integra- 
 tion of men, and therefore not a fall from brotherhood but 
 progress toward it. But the same is true of tribal morals. 
 Like tribal society, nationalism is at best nothing more than a 
 step in a stairway; to pause here as though we had reached 
 finality is as unjust as to rest in prenational achievements. 
 Patriotism must melt into a larger regard for men. Is it not 
 monstrous to find twentieth-century Christians less cosmo- 
 politan than the ancient non-Christian maxim: "Nothing hu- 
 man is foreign to me"? Religious education must take up as 
 one of its specific tasks the production in its pupils of a world- 
 consciousness controlled by a sense of justice. 
 
 Amelioration of the horrors of war, important as it is, is not 
 enough. War does not merely happen to us, like earthquakes 
 and tidal waves; it is rather a climactic expression of the selfish- 
 ness, that is to say the injustice, that is organized in our legal 
 systems and our national sovereignties. It is a part of the 
 same economic grab that erects seizure of natural resources 
 into a right to them, and then makes laborers into hirelings. 
 
60 THE AIMS 
 
 The inner reality of war, of armaments, of national sovereignty, 
 and of national policies that seem to render armaments neces- 
 sary must all be revealed to our pupils so that they shall enlist 
 — heart, conscience, intelligence — in a lifelong, never-relaxing 
 crusade against the legalized injustice that underlies them all, 
 and for positive measures for organizing good will on a world- 
 wide scale. Nothing less than this can be the will of God, who 
 is love. 
 
 Are the social issues of the present the affair of adults 
 only, or of children also ? It seems to be taken for granted 
 that if the specific social issues of the present are to be intro- 
 duced into the Sunday-school curriculum at all, the proper 
 place for them is in the adult class or at most in the later years 
 of adolescence. Up to this point the instruction and training 
 are directed to the formation of such good habits as obedience, 
 truthfulness, and fair play; induction into such exercises as 
 private prayer and public worship, and into such enterprises 
 as missions; and a meagre introduction to social welfare in the 
 form of relief of the poor, the sick, and other sufferers, and in 
 some instances in the form of the fight against the saloon. Not 
 ^a word is ordinarily said to children and young people with 
 respect to the enormous extent of poverty and the reasons there- 
 for, nor as to the reasons why preventable sickness is so prev- 
 alent, nor as to the interest of fundamental justice in such 
 current events as labor disputes and international friction. 
 There is, probably, a sincere belief that tender minds should 
 be shielded from the luridness of the contrast between Fifth 
 Avenue and First Avenue, and between the multimillionaire 
 and his employees. These are felt to be the hard problems of 
 maturity, not at all subject-matter for the instruction of 
 children. 
 
 But let us not deceive ourselves. While we thus sleep the 
 enemy sows tares. From infancy the pupil is in contact with 
 the social order as it is; through this contact he is forming 
 habits, and not only habits, but also the presuppositions of 
 his thinking with respect to men and society. He meets the 
 industrial system in many cases in the family "servant," 
 
THE AIMS 61 
 
 and in all cases in the various purveyors of the goods that the 
 family consumes. He forms very early in life his notions of 
 buying, selling, bargaining, and employing. The current 
 ideas as to what constitutes success he takes as his own just as 
 a sponge soaks up water. The unrighteous standards all about 
 him constantly whisper: "This is real life; this is what hu- 
 man nature is; this is what everybody does; grab your share !" 
 He gets acquainted with newspapers and with newspaper 
 morality long before the Sunday school even mentions problems 
 of social righteousness. He is aware of the general run of cur- 
 rent events, and he interprets them incautiously under the in- 
 fluence of whatever social standard happens to get his ear. If, 
 then, education postpones mentioning these great issues until 
 the near approach of maturity, it has to correct social pre- 
 suppositions and purposes already formed. Shall we forever 
 go on making the foolish assumption that the ^(Vill of the child 
 remains neutral for years and years with regard to the con- 
 test between justice and injustice ? Shall we go on postponing 
 in education what is not and cannot be postponed in the child's 
 social experience? 
 
 Some consequences of not focussing the pupiPs atten- 
 tion upon concrete social issues. Ethical reality is found in 
 social relations, and nowhere else. Here and here only are 
 the issues of conscience and of character. Hence it is that, 
 when the ideals that religious education seeks to inculcate 
 lack social insight and breadth, results like these follow: 
 
 (1) The pupil is led to struggle against faults conceived as 
 simply his own instead of for co-operative objects that will super- 
 sede his faults and help some one else at the same time. Whenever 
 we lead a child to think that he alone is blameworthy for his 
 faults, we err as to the facts. A faulty will, as distinguished 
 from mere inexperience, always involves a conjoint fault in 
 which adults have some share. The child has taken on the 
 selfish ways of adults, and then been blamed for doing so; or 
 adults have indulged or neglected childish impulses that require 
 training; or adults have misunderstood and mistrained him. 
 The cure for these conjoint faults is not introversion of the 
 
62 THE AIMS 
 
 child mind, but enlargement of social outlook and purpose, 
 particularly in co-operation with adults. 
 
 (2) The pupil is led into unwholesome, sometimes paralyzing 
 introspection of the ups and downs of his inner life, or into fruit- 
 less reflection upon his status in the eyes of God. That is, 
 religious education that ought to fix the pupil's attention upon 
 the things that express the outgoing, self-forgetting character 
 of the Father, does exactly the contrary. Consequently pupils 
 form petty and distorted notions of the divine. God is taken 
 to be a taskmaster, or spy, or aristocrat instead of a worker 
 with whom all workers can have fellowship, and from whom all 
 can get help. 
 
 (3) The machinery of the church, and exercises that go on 
 within church buildings acquire undue prominence as compared 
 with the influence that the church has upon the world that sur- 
 rounds it. Ecclesiasticism, it is true, readily associates itself 
 with remedial charity even to the point of noble self-sacrifice. 
 But this is not the same as devotion to justice in the broadly 
 human sense, which is also the broadly divine and democratic 
 sense. On this broad basis churchmanship, and all ecclesias- 
 tical zeal and loyalty, have to be judged, like the love of one's 
 country, by their tendency to pass or not to pass through all 
 narrower societies into world society. 
 
 (4) The pupil is led to separate his daily occupation, the sphere 
 in which he makes a living or accumidates property, from his 
 Christian vocation. Instead of trying to Christianize his busi- 
 ness, he endeavors to be a Christian in business. Consequently 
 he imagines that he fulfils the law of love when he gives away, 
 by his own arbitrary act, some part of a product that is due to 
 the joint labor of many besides himself. If wealth be his, he 
 is taught to think of himself as a divinely appointed steward, 
 even though traces of God's love are not obvious in the 
 process whereby the wealth was accumulated. The point of 
 this is not that one should blame oneself or be blamed by 
 others for doing business in the only ways that are possible at 
 the present time. Accumulation of property does not neces- 
 sarily imply accumulation of individual sinfulness, for the fault 
 
THE AIMS 63 
 
 IS a conjoint one. In every business that is conducted under 
 our present system of competition in profit taking, the owner 
 has associated with him all the social forces that make and 
 administer our laws, all those that create rigid business cus- 
 toms, yes, earlier generations that have bequeathed to us their 
 own ideas and ways. What is to be expected of the Christian 
 business man is that he will not only be generous as generosity 
 is measured under our capitalistic presuppositions, but that he 
 will also be just by doing everything within his power to curb 
 and ultimately make impossible the exploitation of human 
 life for the sake of profits. The real function of every business 
 must be held to be, not the greatest possible concentration in 
 the control of goods, which are conditions of welfare, but the 
 greatest possible increase and the widest possible distribution of 
 welfare itself. To hold business to this function is one of the 
 fundamental phases of any real Christianization of the world. 
 In the daylight of a purpose like this, what a shadowy thing is 
 the private goodness upon which the attention of our pupils 
 has been traditionally fixed I 
 
r 
 
 / 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE FIRST ESSENTIALS OF AN EDUCATIONAL 
 
 PLAN 
 
 We have seen that the social ideahsm of Christianity pre- 
 scribes for reHgious education as an ultimate goal the trans- 
 formation of a social order that is largely unjust into one that 
 shall be wholly just, and that, consequently, religious educa- 
 tion must enter directly, not merely by distant implication, 
 into the social struggles of the present. Let us now see how this 
 large purpose can become a guiding principle for determining 
 the main essentials of an educational plan. It is hardly 
 necessary to argue again that to socialize the group we must 
 individualize the pupils, that is, lead each one to adopt justice 
 as his very own desire, purpose, and practice. This involves 
 four aspects of religious growth, and provision therefor. 
 
 I. Provision for growth in knowledge of the Christian 
 ideal, and of the means and methods whereby it is gradually 
 securing control of social forces. The function of the curric- 
 ulum maker is to select and systematize such knowledge; 
 the function of the text-book maker is to prepare it in some 
 detail with reference to the established principles of the learn- 
 ing process; the function of the teacher is to effect the assimila- 
 tion of this material by particular pupils with their individual 
 capacities and needs. The whole may be called instruction. 
 
 (1) The aim of instruction is not to impose truth but to pro- 
 mote growth. The whole teaching enterprise is to be brought 
 under the notion of growth — of vital, not mechanical proc- 
 esses. Hence the term "instruction" must be emptied of its 
 traditional implication of telling pupils what to believe. To 
 impose our beliefs upon a child, even though the beliefs be 
 
 64 
 
THE FIRST ESSENTIALS 65 
 
 utterly true, is not to promote the growth of a free personality — 
 it may even be an invasion of personality; it may subject one 
 individual to another instead of emancipating each and every 
 one into full membership in a self-governing society, the de- 
 mocracy of God. 
 
 To argue that we already possess the truth, since it has been 
 revealed, and that therefore we ought to impose beliefs upon 
 children, betrays an interesting confusion. The elements 
 with which the argument deals are three: The truth, the pupil, 
 and the teacher who is supposed to bring these two together. 
 What, now, if the teacher is unable to eliminate himself from the 
 finished product? What if the teacher comes between the 
 pupil's mind and the truth, and stays there? This, in fact, 
 does happen when the attempt to impose beliefs is most success- 
 ful. WTien pupils are tractable, what is the authority to which 
 they submit — what is it, that is, from their own point of view ? 
 It is the Sunday-school teacher, the pastor, the text-book, or 
 tradition in the form of hearsay. Even if we train the pupil 
 to say sincerely that it is the Pope, the church, or the Bible to 
 which he submits, this say-so of his is our own handiwork; 
 we have interposed ourselves between the pupil and reality, 
 and we have no guarantee that the truth becomes his own 
 possession. 
 
 The whole notion of transferring ready-made thoughts to the 
 mind of another is psychologically fallacious. When a pupil 
 trustingly repeats our formulae after us, and even when he 
 sincerely believes that he grasps and holds as his own the truth 
 that the formulae represent, what really happens is that he is 
 moved by social forces to conform to the group that surrounds 
 him and to separate himself by pseudoknowledge from other 
 men. What we have here is neither knowledge nor belief in 
 any vital sense, but partisanship. This kind of instruction in 
 childhood produces not only in Catholicism but also in Prot- 
 estantism an easily recognized adult type, the man who settles 
 historical and scientific questions without historical or scientific 
 study, and by the results judges whether his neighbors are sheep 
 or goats. 
 
66 THE FIRST ESSENTIALS 
 
 (2) What is gradation of material f The essence of instruc- 
 tion is promotion of genuine thinking. Consequently the con- 
 tent of instruction should change with the pupil's growing 
 capacity for thought. Here is the foundation for gradation 
 of material as an unescapable necessity of good teaching. 
 The principle goes deeper than is realized even by many who 
 insist upon it. From the history of religious instruction a 
 ladder like the following might be constructed: First, a fixed 
 and formulated body of doctrine or of ritualistic forms is 
 drilled into the pupil's memory. Second, in order to secure 
 some adaptation to the pupil, the language is simplified, or the 
 formula is abbreviated. Third, still further to help the pupil 
 to understand this material, stories, pictures, and analogies are 
 introduced from outside. Fourth, when the fallacy of the 
 attempt to transfer a whole system of doctrine to child minds 
 becomes unbearably clear, the next move is to select from this 
 system, or from the Scripture, or from ecclesiastical history, 
 traditions, and usages, the parts that seem likely to have the 
 greatest inherent interest for children of each grade, so that a 
 part of the system may be transferred at one age, a part 
 at another, and in due time the whole. Fifth, when the re- 
 ligious growth of the pupil as distinguished from the transfer 
 of a system comes to be accepted as the proper aim of in- 
 struction, a curriculum is constructed by picking out from 
 the same presupposed body of doctrine, history, sacred story, 
 and church usages the parts best adapted to help pupils live 
 religiously on their own level at the different periods of growth. 
 
 Many teachers have believed that here at last the principle 
 of gradation is completely in control. But is not the ancient 
 fallacy still here in the limitation of the sources when the ma- 
 terial of instruction is drawn? When we have made clear 
 to ourselves what sort of world the Father and we as his chil- 
 dren desire, must not our next concern be that the young 
 also should desire it ? What boots it if they know all Scripture, 
 all doctrine, all church history, and church usages, if they have 
 not both the forward look and the sort of desire that can re- 
 construct a world? What the pupil needs to adjust himself 
 
THE FIRST ESSENTIALS 67 
 
 to is not anything as it has been, but something as it ought to 
 be. Let the curriculum be drawn from any sort of material — \ 
 Scripture, history, church life and enterprise, the world of the 
 pupil's present experience and of his imagination — anything 
 that will most surely and rapidly make him share in the Father's 
 desire and labor for society. At each point in the child's grow- 
 ing experience, the essential question is : What in all the world is 
 most likely, if we turn his attention to it, to increase his active, 
 intelligent devotion to the Christian purpose? 
 
 (3) The sources of material for Christian instruction. Two 
 sorts of knowledge are central in Christian instruction, knowl- 
 edge of what the Christian purpose is, and of means and me.thods^ 
 for making it prevail. The Scriptures are to be used as a means 
 to this end, not as an end in themselves, and we must not as- 
 sume in advance that they contain everything that is needful 
 for this vital sort of graded instruction. As a matter of fact, 
 they do not. We might guess as much from the simple consider- 
 ation that nearly all parts of the Bible were written with adults 
 and their problems in mind. But the limitation goes deeper 
 than this. Every biblical writing reflects, to a greater or less 
 extent, the social presuppositions of its own age, presupposi- 
 tions that have to be examined, criticised, and revised. Ele- 
 ments of our own social problems we do find there, indeed, and 
 they are highly instructive, as the land problem, for example. 
 But if we would master the fresh perplexities that have come 
 with the advent of popular government and machine manu- 
 facture, and if we would press toward a democracy of God, we 
 must turn the attention of pupils to many matters that are this 
 side of the biblical horizon. 
 
 The notion that the Bible contains everything that is needed 
 in Christian instruction is sometimes supported by the asser- 
 tion that if we loved our neighbors as the Bible tells us to do, 
 our whole social problem would be solved. This statement is 
 either a paralytic truism or else it is false. If it means that 
 love, intelligently exercised by all persons concerned, would 
 find a way to cure the ills in question, it is a truism, and it 
 is almost as ineffective as the insight that if we could keep all 
 
68 THE FIRST ESSENTIALS 
 
 the cells of everybody's lungs functioning properly we could 
 rid the world of pulmonary tuberculosis. On the other hand, 
 if it means that our social ills arise altogether from the fact that 
 men who have faced the issue of justice take the side of injus- 
 tice, it is false. One of the fundamental reasons why we do 
 not love one another more generally and more intelligently is 
 that the conditions under wliich children grow up constitute a 
 training in selfishness and in partisanship. We are prevented 
 from seeing the real issues, and from getting sufficiently ac- 
 quainted with our neighbors to know how capable they and we 
 ^are of disinterested neighborliness. 
 
 / What we need is not merely to be advised to love men more 
 / regardless of conditions, but also to see clearly that we are sup- 
 I porting social customs and even laws that actually reward self- 
 \ ishness with power and honor. We who would like to love our 
 '^neighbors as ourselves are maintaining systems of social con- 
 trol that actually prevent us from doing it. What ails us is not 
 merely that we have grown up in ignorance of the Scriptures, 
 nor that our hearts are unresponsive to the call of Jesus. How 
 many men and women who are well versed in the Scriptures, 
 and whose loyalty to the Master is unquestioned, nevertheless 
 do not see that Scriptural principles, and particularly the mind 
 of the Master, are vitally concerned in the present struggle for 
 social justice. A glowing inner life of good will and tender- 
 ness and aspiration, a life that feeds daily upon the manna of 
 religious history, is of itself no guarantee of the kind of in- 
 telligence that is necessary for the reconstruction of the world. 
 To produce such intelligence. Christian instruction must turn 
 the attention of pupils directly upon economic, political, and 
 any other social conditions that contradict the spirit of brother- 
 hood, upon successful experiments in social living, and upon 
 outreaching ideals and reforms. 
 
 This conception of Christian instruction refuses to separate 
 knowledge and belief from the enterprise of living. It assumes 
 that intelligence and active desire should be awakened as a single 
 experience. Yet this is far from implying any narrow-gauge 
 practicality or spiritual fussiness. A social conception of life 
 
<^n 
 
 THE FIRST ESSENTIALS 69 
 
 has room, as perhaps no other has, for high valuation of art, 
 nature, Hterature, philosophy, and historical forms of doctrine. 
 The worth of them all grows from being shared, and because 
 the generations are knit together. Everything that can be 
 democratically enjoyed without consequences that are undemo- 
 cratic belongs within the Christian conception of the life that 
 is appropriate to sons of the Highest. "All things are yours." 
 ^ n. Practice in using the tools of the Christian enterprise. 
 Just as a child's social thinking is influenced from infancy by 
 his contacts with society, so his actual practices with respect 
 to others tend from the beginning to become fixed as a per- 
 manent mode of life. Because this practice is constant, there 
 is no neutral period during which specific training in social 
 enterprises must wait. Planned or unplanned training goes 
 on anyhow; the hand is being shaped to some sort of social 
 tools. Habits formed now go deep in respect both to what 
 they include and to what they exclude. For it is by doing some- 
 thing in a given situation that particular elements of it come to 
 our attention. Thus it is that we form habits of noticing or 
 of not noticing the feelings and interests of others. A habit 
 of not noticing is also a habit of not sympathizing. Many an 
 amiable man is callous toward one or another class of his fel- 
 lows, and impermeable to important humanitarian appeals, 
 because in his plastic years he did not acquire the technic of 
 seeing and feeling and acting in such matters. 
 
 Nothing in Christian education can be more fundamental, 
 therefore, than participation of pupils with one another and with 
 their elders in Christian enterprises, that is, enterprises that 
 aim at social welfare, social justice, and a world society. Re- 
 serving for succeeding chapters various problems of metho( 
 and of organization that are related to this training in the 
 use of social tools, let us now guard against possible miscon- 
 ceptions of its place in a total view of educational ends. Cau- 
 tion is particularly necessary lest "tools'' and "practice" be 
 thought of as something apart from normal social living, as 
 mere preparation for such living. On the contrary, the point 
 is that children obtain the best social training by being a real 
 
70 THE FIRST ESSENTIALS 
 
 part of the working force of the world. They mature their 
 control of tools not by merely handling them or by brandish- 
 ing them in the air, but by doing some part of the world's work. 
 We as educators are not to place the child in any invented 
 scheme of spiritual gymnastics — things done wholly for the 
 sake of the future — but rather, recognizing the vast variety 
 and scope of social need, we are to admit even little children 
 to partnership with us in the enterprise of meeting it. This 
 is the way for them to acquire not only the mechanics of social 
 work, but also the intelligence and the trained and sympa- 
 thetic perceptions of a mature Christian. What a practical 
 absurdity it is that so many church members should make 
 their first real acquaintance with philanthropies, social reforms, 
 and missions, in mature life, and what wonder is it that inti- 
 mate acquaintance under these conditions is so rare ? 
 
 m. Preparation for a particular place in society, first 
 in the family, and second in an occupation. The inclusion 
 of domestic and vocational training within religious education 
 is necessitated by the fact, already pointed out, that the love 
 that is justice demands the whole of a man's social allegiance. 
 To help, in his own sphere, to rebuild society is the life-work of 
 every Christian. It is to be foreseen, studied, planned for in 
 the true professional spirit, and with the same regard for tech- 
 nical proficiency that one looks for in a lawyer, a physician, or 
 a mining engineer. 
 
 This is the spirit that should control marriage, family life, 
 and the procreation and rearing of children. Domestic life 
 is to be governed and tested, not by its contribution to the 
 comfort of the individual members as such, but by its actualiza- 
 tion of the democracy of God within itself, and then by its 
 outgoing influence upon the wider society. Marriage is to be 
 specifically prepared for as a calling of God, and the domestic 
 habits of both husband and wife are to be lifted above mere 
 conventionality, inclination, and happen-so into the sphere of 
 defined social service and efiiciency. The household labor of 
 women, and the bearing and care of children, are to be treated as 
 a professional, skilled occupation — a sphere for ambition, study. 
 
THE FIRST ESSENTIALS 71 
 
 and social recognition. That women who devote them- 
 selves to these duties have at present so scanty recognition as 
 producers, being regarded as dependents upon their husbands, 
 or as being supported by the industry of another, is a partial 
 indication of the reconstructive work that has to be done by 
 education. 
 
 It is no new thing to think of all legitimate occupations as 
 so many spheres for the service of God. But one does not serve 
 God in one's occupation any further than one serves human 
 society. God does not require to be fed and clothed; the only 
 thing that we can do for him that he cannot do for himself is 
 to be brothers one to another. Every occupation is to be 
 transformed into a specialized method of an effective brother- 
 hood, and to this end a proper part of every occupation is to 
 help in improving the social standards, including the laws, that 
 apply to it. Our religion dissents profoundly from the world's 
 generally accepted standards. If we were half awake to the 
 radical character of this dissent, we should not accept the cur- 
 rent assumption that vocational studies concern simply the 
 methods of getting certain things done; instead, we should insist 
 that analysis of the human relations involved in any occupa- 
 tion is the fundamental vocational study. Until such analysis 
 is included in our systems of general and vocational education, 
 the churches should themselves provide it for the children and 
 young people who are committed to their care. In and thi^ough 
 such analysis we can hope to develop a Christian vocational 
 purpose, the purpose to use one's particular position in the social 
 and economic complex as a fulcrum for moving this complex 
 itself toward the level of brotherhood. 
 
 IV. Growth in social motives. Our discussion of knowl- 
 edge, practice, and vocational preparation has already included 
 the notion that all along the line of advance there should be a 
 growing socialization of the inner life of desire. Growth in 
 motives is now set down as a fourth phase of growth, not be- 
 cause it is separate or separable from these three, but because 
 it requires special attention. It requires attention in the first 
 place because existing reh'gious education does to a consider- 
 
72 THE FIRST ESSENTIALS 
 
 /^able extent assume a separation between motive on the one 
 
 \ hand, and on the other hand knowledge and practical activities. 
 ] What is the ordinary meaning of loving God, or of accepting 
 / Christ, or of entire consecration? Are they not presented as 
 ^ if they could take place in a social vacuum, and as if the char- 
 acter of God, of Christ, and of oneself required no reference to 
 concrete brotherhood ? Is it not true that children and young 
 
 j people are being taught to "get right with God" first, and be 
 
 I social-minded afterward? 
 
 ^ The result of such efforts to produce an mner life, or Chris- 
 tian motive, as something per se we behold in a multitude of 
 church members who mean well but do not know what " well " 
 means; who intend to be loyal to Christ but do not realize to 
 what he is loyal; who sincerely desire the triumph of right but 
 leave social technic to those who have individualistic interests 
 to serve by it. We shall overcome these things, which are a 
 reproach to us, only when, accepting in simple literalness our 
 ancient doctrine that the supreme revelation of God is one with 
 the supreme revelation of man, we teach the young that to 
 I know God we must be socially intelligent, that to make his will 
 I our own is a matter of social practice, and that entire consecra- 
 ' tion is a strictly vocational concept. 
 
 Another reason why motives require specific attention is 
 that growth in motives is a relatively neglected notion. We 
 must make clear both that change is normal and in what a 
 normal change consists. Here again we are dealing with the 
 forward, not the backward, look. What distinguishes a motive 
 from a merely instinctive impulse is just looking ahead. A 
 motive is anything in a contemplated, not yet actualized, situa- 
 tion that renders it attractive and thus stimulates us to make it 
 actual. The good heart is nothing esoteric, nothing merely 
 inner; it can always be defined objectively in terms of that 
 upon which we are actually expending our energy and our 
 resources. Growth in Christian motives means, therefore, 
 changes in the pupil's outlook toward future social good. It 
 means finer discrimination between relative values, and be- 
 tween ends and means, and corresponding change in fineness 
 
THE FIRST ESSENTIALS 73 
 
 and breadth of appreciation, which is the beginning of fine 
 and broad social conduct.^ 
 
 This is the inner life that is to be cultivated; this is "growth 
 in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus 
 Christ." To this end is Christian self -discipline. To this 
 end also is culture of the devotional lif^. whether in public 
 worship or in private meditation and prayer. That we may 
 be conformed to the social will of God, and enjoy being con- 
 formed to it — this is the p urpose and meaning of devotional 
 exercises of all sorts. This does not mean substituting human 
 society for fellowship with God, but rather finding God where he 
 himself is pleased to dwell. Where shall the child find the 
 Father? Wherever the child's desire goes out after the things 
 that the Father loves, that is, the persons who are the supreme 
 objects of divine solicitude. There can be no purely private 
 relation to God, for our very selfhood is conjunct. We are made 
 selves by a give-and-take with others — and we are made in his 
 image. 
 
 1 This brief statement must suffice imtil we reach Chapter XIV. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE EDUCATIVE PROCESS IS RELIGIOUS 
 EXPERIENCE 
 
 Why do some persons deny that religion can be taught? 
 
 In some types of Protestantism the following remarkable 
 anomaly is to be found: .^Insistence upon religious teaching for 
 the young, but denial that religion can be taught. The argu- 
 ment for religious teaching runs to the effect that the impres- 
 sionable, plastic years of childhood and youth are of crucial 
 importance for adult character. The argument against the 
 possibility of teaching religion bases itself upon the assertion 
 that real religion, at least in the fully Christian sense, is an 
 inner, intimately personal, and therefore incommunicable 
 experience. The attempt to teach religion simmers down, 
 according to this view, to teaching about religion. 
 
 That the two elements of this view have not been recon- 
 ciled in practice will appear from the next section. How, in- 
 deed, can one produce an educational system when in the same 
 breath one asserts and yet denies the efficacy of teaching? 
 Let us ask, then, how any Christian thought could manoeuvre 
 itself into this corner. The answer is twofold: 
 
 (1) Because they endeavor to hold at the same time to a vital or 
 experiential view of the Christian life, and a dogmatic-intellectual- 
 istic view of the Christian revelation. If the Christian revela- 
 tion consists in certain dogmas, then the Christian life should 
 consist in the intellectual act of learning and holding the dog- 
 mas. In this case Christian education would be identical with 
 intellectualistic instruction. But if, on the contrary, the 
 Christian revelation is " made flesh," if it is a concrete life that 
 inspires and renews our life, then to be a Christian would be 
 
 74 
 
THE PROCESS 75 
 
 something far more vital, and Christian education, instead of 
 being instruction about dogmas, would be an initiation into 
 actual living upon the plane of the Christian purpose. 
 
 But what will be one's view of Christian education if one 
 holds at the same time to an intellectualistic view of revelation 
 and an experiential view of the Christian life? What has 
 actually happened in this case is this: Education has been 
 viewed as essentially a means of transmitting dogmas; but, 
 since even the devils can believe and still be devils (as we are 
 often assured), it has been insistently claimed that religion 
 cannot be taught. And indeed vital religion does not and can- 
 not get into education through dogmatic-intellectualistic as- 
 sumptions as to God's approach to man. The language that 
 is attributed to God is not that which the child's heart speaks; 
 the problems that are raised are those of the theologian, not 
 of the child, and, besides, the whole is finished, fixed, rigid, while 
 the child is all movement, all becoming. 
 
 Yet many who hold to a dogmatic view of revelation insist 
 upon an experiential or vital view of the Christian life. They 
 cannot be blind, of course, to the significance of childhood 
 plasticity for such a life. But, having committed themselves 
 to a dogmatic type of religious education, they deny that re- 
 ligion can be taught, and then they flounder in search of some 
 method for religiously influencing children. All the inconsis- 
 tency and all the floundering could be avoided by a whole- 
 hearted acceptance of the idea that God's revelation of himself 
 is always in the form of flesh; that it is in Jesus, and in every 
 human will that follows him. One could then look upon a 
 child's gradual achieving of the full Christian purpose as itself 
 a growing communion with God, a gradual self-impartation of 
 God to his belcyved child. The educational process would then 
 fuse with Christian experience. 
 
 (2) A second reason for this educational anomaly is that 
 this type of thought, though it holds that religious living includes 
 both relations to God and relations to men, does not fuse the two as 
 Jesus did. If we can hold that the love that is toward God 
 and the love that is toward men are not two, but one, and that 
 
76 THE PROCESS 
 
 this one is communion with the Father, then the social unfolding 
 of a child can be luminous with divine meaning. There is 
 then no antithesis between the socializing of the will and 
 Christian experience. God speaks to the child, and the child 
 to God in a language that both understand. But if we hold 
 that one's primary relation to God is purely private, that it has 
 to do with subjective mysteries, and that only through a pre- 
 liminary grasp of these mysteries is one prepared for truly 
 Christian social relations, then indeed religion cannot be taught. 
 
 Consequences of the doctrine that "religion is caught, 
 not taught." The attempt to teach religion at the same 
 time that the possibility of teaching it is denied leads quite 
 naturally to dualism in practice. 
 
 (1) Unsteadiness of aim prevails, and consequent failure to 
 set up defi7iite standards. If we ask what the purpose of a 
 Sunday school is, we are told that the purpose is to teach 
 the Bible. But if we point out that those who avow this as 
 their purpose do not teach the Bible with any thoroughness at 
 all, the ground is shifted. We are now told that the purpose 
 is to mould the character of the pupil by placing him directly 
 under Christian influences for an hour and a half every Sun- 
 day. If we go on to ask why these influences have not been 
 systematized, and why recognizable standards and tests of 
 their efficiency have not been set up, we are reminded that 
 religion is caught, not taught ! 
 
 The \drtue of this epigram is missed by some who are fond of 
 using it. It is, or should be, a drive at intellectualism, or at 
 the identification of instruction with education. When it is 
 used to discredit system, and standards, and tests, in the 
 Christward guidance of the child's social experience, it becomes 
 an arrow shot at the goose that lays the golden eggs. It is 
 true that many a teacher untrained in methods, and making 
 many a blunder in methods, has nevertheless had a profoundly 
 educative influence upon his pupils. Shall we not assume that 
 his success is due to the fact that he really conformed, though 
 without realizing it, to fundamental laws of religious growth? 
 Surely the life of the spirit is a realm of order, not a chaos of 
 
THE PROCESS 77 
 
 forces. Why, then, do we not analyze the ways of teachers who 
 succeed, whether with or without training, to the end that we 
 may systematize the principles of their success, and thus show 
 others how to succeed ? In other words, the laws that underlie 
 effective religious education are identical with the laws of spirit- 
 ual growth. Therefore a wabbly scheme of religious education 
 justifies a query as to the views of religion that underlie it. 
 
 (2) Interruptions of the educative process are tolerated, and even 
 regarded as nonnal. Any one who will take the trouble to 
 analyze the experience of a pupil minute by minute through one 
 session of an ordinary Sunday school can know for himself how 
 constantly non-educative procedures mix with education. 
 The o^eninp^ exercise s are a jumble of worship, business, and 
 drill. 'If we ask why these exercises should be held at all, 
 we may be told that the children should learn to worship. 
 But if we examine the program and method, we find only a 
 feeble grasp, or none at all, of the idea of education in and 
 through worship. The aii^s of the worship are indefinite, and 
 both content and method are unsystematized, unadapted, and 
 untested. Besides, the s etting of worship — the way it is el- 
 bowed by business, speechmaking (sometimes from visitors 
 who can only guess what the situation demands), and crude 
 disciplinary measures (banging of bells, calls for order, shouting 
 above the din, scolding) — this setting is not strongly suggestive 
 of a growing sense of the presence of God. And this sort of 
 thing in the opening and the closing exercises occupies the 
 major part of the meagre time at the disposal of the school. 
 The lesson period, during which educative procedures are sup- 
 posed to be entirely in control, is pared down to a minimum. 
 Not only so; even this minimum is reduced through interrup- 
 tions by secretaries, through encroachments of prolonged open- 
 ing exercises, and through the demands of anniversaries and 
 "special occasions. '* 
 
 Nor do interruptions of educational procedures end even 
 here. Irruptions of child evangelism occur in various forms, 
 from exhortations by preachers or teachers, through high- 
 pressure "decision days" that are not integrated into the gen- 
 
78 THE PROCESS 
 
 eral educational work of the school, to mass-meetings of chil- 
 dren conducted by itinerant evangeHsts over whom the educa- 
 tional authorities of the school have no control. All this gives 
 one an impression that "getting religion" is independent of 
 religious education, and it leads one to wonder what, then, 
 religious education is supposed to be and to do. 
 
 The roots of these incongruities are doubtless manifold. 
 We must of course give religious education time to grow up, 
 and we must not make its immaturity an occasion for bela- 
 boring the faithful men and women, mostly laymen without 
 opportunity for technical training, who are giving the best 
 that they have to the children. All honor to the workers in 
 our Sunday schools ! Here is massed together such an amount 
 of Christian consecration, such an amount of unrequited 
 labor for others, as was never before seen in the history of our 
 religion. Our present question concerns the effective organiza- 
 tion of this enormous energy. We need to know whether it is 
 being scattered, or misdirected, or thwarted by inconsistency 
 of plan and method. If so, we must know why. The conclu- 
 sion that we have reached is that there is vast leakage of energy, 
 enormous waste of consecrated labor, because so many persons, 
 believing that "religion is caught, not taught," counteract 
 their own efforts to teach religion. 
 
 (3) A third consequence of the doctrine that " religion is caught, 
 not taught" is unfairness to teachers. If religion is to be spread 
 among the young solely by a process of infection, it follows, of 
 course, that the one thing needful is to bring the pupil within 
 the area of a teacher's personal influence. That a profound 
 educational conception lies hidden in the notion of spiritual 
 life as communicated from person to person by fellowship will 
 appear from our next section. But dim vision of a great truth 
 may give it the effect of a half-truth, and half-truths have re- 
 markable power to hurt as well as to heal. The current em- 
 phasis upon the teacher's personality is a case in point. How 
 often do we hear that the success of a given teacher is due to a 
 "natural gift for teaching," or to an attractive personality, 
 or to intense consecration. If we should take this at its face 
 
THE PROCESS 79 
 
 value, what ugly implications it would carry with respect to 
 the rank and file of earnest teachers who do not have success of 
 the shining sort that brings out such remarks. Because certain 
 persons have stumbled upon methods that succeed, we praise 
 their personalities; because the stumbling of others has not 
 turned out quite as happily, we put them in an inferior class. 
 Yet within this class we shall find, If we look for it, the capacity 
 to succeed if only the requirements of the work in hand can be 
 pointed out clearly. Here are Christian character, zeal, faith- 
 fulness, intelligence; what right have we to discount them? 
 Granted the presence of these qualities, with no positively 
 counteracting twist, we ought to be able to say: "We will 
 show you how to succeed, and we will provide the remaining 
 conditions of success." 
 
 (4) A fourth consequence is inertia in the matter of teacher- 
 training. There are several reasons why the training of Sunday- 
 school teachers has been so halting an affair. We shall have 
 occasion after a time to analyze the complications that are 
 involved. But, running through the whole, at least in certain 
 quarters, is the silent, counteracting, anaesthetizing vapor of 
 an educational scepticism that supposes itself to be religious 
 faith. If such scepticism were not abroad, and deep seated, 
 how could so many pastors give religious education only a 
 secondary place, or worse, in their plans for pastoral adminis- 
 tration, and how could they abandon teacher-training to the 
 chance that somebody else will see its importance and do some- 
 thing about it ? To correct this educational scepticism we must 
 proclaim not only laws of psychology, but also laws of Christian 
 life and experience. We must think of Christian living neither 
 in terms of a dogmatic system nor in terms of an esoteric and 
 incommunicable salvation, but in terms of objective social 
 relations that produce and are produced by the individually 
 realized attitude and purpose called love. From this point of 
 view we shall be able to see that Christian education falls under 
 the head of promoting a life of deliberate purpose, a life that 
 fulfils itself by methods that It itself can objectively view, 
 analyze, and systematically control. How readily the elements 
 
80 THE PROCESS 
 
 of the educative process fall into place, and form a unified whole, 
 under this conception we shall now see. 
 
 The central fact of the educative process is a growing 
 Christian experience in and through the pupil's social 
 interactions. If we really believe that "where love is, God 
 is," and if by love we understand, as Jesus did, not a mere 
 sentiment or impulse, but a purpose, a policy for self -guidance, 
 a thing that does not evaporate as soon as one turns deliberate 
 attention to it, then we can have a religious education that 
 moves entu-ely within religion. It will consist fundamentally 
 in providing for children conditions in which love is experi- 
 enced, practised, wrought into steady and deliberate living by 
 the help of both intellectual analysis and habit formation, and 
 developed into a faith that illumines the crises and the mysteries 
 of life. To speak more in detail, such education will include 
 the following part processes: 
 
 (1) Making the pupil acquainted with persons who really 
 love him and others also. The first thing in Christian education 
 is not an idea, but a personal fellowship. Here is the truth that 
 is confusedly contained in the current emphasis upon the person- 
 ality of the teacher. The confusion lies in the substitution of 
 personal attachment between pupil and teacher for attachment 
 of the pupil to society through the teacher. The importance 
 of the acquaintance depends upon the degree to which the 
 pupil realizes that the love that the teacher has for him is not a 
 merely individual attachment, and that the joy of it is all the 
 richer because others have a share in it. We merely express 
 this in another way if we say that the first and fundamental 
 element in the Christian educative process is the introduction 
 of the pupil to the specific happiness of being a member of a 
 v^. society. Here lies the measureless potentiality of the family 
 lias an agency of Christian education. Here, as we shall see, is 
 the base-line for a theory of the church as educator. In the 
 detailed work of religious teaching, the principle is already 
 beginning to appear in such practices as these: The teacher of 
 a new class of beginners undertakes as her first task to make 
 the little children happily acquainted both with her and with 
 
THE PROCESS 81 
 
 one another; the principle of the organized Sunday-school 
 class is moving downward from the adult and senior divisions 
 through the whole school, effort being made to cause each class 
 to feel itself as a little society, even though there be no formal 
 constitution or by-laws; and effort is being made, by many en- 
 richments of social joy, to obliterate the break between the 
 social grouping on Sunday and that of week-days. <je^ 
 
 (2) As far as any pupil finds satisfaction or what seems to 
 him to be real life in such sharing, he experiences what is fun- 
 damental in the divine purpose — he has, to this extent, a Chris- 
 tian experience. But Christian education undertakes to de- 
 velop this experience from such rudimentary beginnings into 
 the full and large purpose of the democracy of God. There- 
 fore, the next part process may be stated as causing the pupil's 
 social attachments to expand from narrower to wider groups. 
 Family loyalties must be merged into humane interests of the 
 widest scope. The social consciousness of a Sunday-school 
 class must enlarge into a school consciousness, and this into a 
 church consciousness ; and the whole must flow outward toward 
 the whole needy world. 
 
 (3) This outgoing purpose can be fulfilled only by an expand- 
 ing series of social activities. One's social status, in the Chris- 
 tian sense of "social status," becomes a firmly accomplished 
 fact only by repeated social acts that become social habits. 
 Social character means nothing less than arriving at a point 
 where social conduct occurs as a matter of course. Likewise, 
 the exodus from a lesser to a greater group consciousness is 
 effected not merely by fresh sympathies but also by fresh acts 
 out of which habits can grow. Enlargement of social conscious- 
 ness does not have to precede, but to be developed in and 
 through, enlarging co-operation in serious social undertakings. 
 
 It would be a happy circumstance if the term "curriculum""^ 
 could be understood to mean not merely an orderly succession j 
 of ideas or knowledges appropriate to the pupil's expanding I 
 experience, but also an orderly succession of enterprises in ' 
 and through which social appreciation, social habits, and social 
 loyalties may grow into the full stature of the Christian's faith. J , 
 
82 THE PROCESS 
 
 Religious education moved a step in this direction when occa- 
 sional, unsystematized talks about missions, and appeals for 
 missionary contributions, gave way to definite missionary 
 enterprises and specific contacts with particular missionaries 
 and missionary fields by a school or by a class. The movement 
 is now proceeding much further by including works of mercy 
 and help within the regular program of each class. Here and 
 there an older class has adopted a program of investigation 
 and of labor for community betterment. These are signs of 
 mighty import for the future of religious education. They are 
 the rosy fingers of dawn opening the portals of day. 
 
 (4) Within this practice in loving we find the basis for a most 
 vital theory of Christian instruction. For now, instead of at- 
 tempting to transfer to the child mind certain truths that we 
 hope will enter into his experience in a vital manner at some 
 indefinite future time, we help him to define, understand, and 
 improve something that he is already doing and enjoying. There 
 is no longer the deadly separation of knowing from doing, or 
 of Christian doctrine from Christian experience. The function 
 of instruction now becomes this : To assist the child to analyze 
 ;the situations, purposes, and activities with which he has to do, 
 (so that impulsive goodness shall grow into a deliberate good 
 I will; so that the sphere of the good will shall be better and better 
 I understood; so that co-operation in social causes shall be 
 organized on a wider and wider scale and with ever-increasing 
 efficiency, and so that all the resources of a cultivated spirit 
 may be known and made available for all. 
 
 This is not a narrower or less intellectual conception of Chris- 
 tian instruction than the one that takes its starting-point 
 from the dogmatic-intellectualistic notion of divine revelation. 
 Stimulus for intellectual activity is here, and the interest to 
 which appeal is made is as broad as the Christian ideal itself. 
 Anything in history, literature, or doctrine that actually illumi- 
 ^ nates the path of active love, any kind of knowledge that can 
 ; be turned into power for social living, anything that imagina- 
 tion or discursive reason can contribute to thoroughly socialized 
 satisfactions — all this belongs within Christian instruction under 
 
THE PROCESS 83 
 
 the social presuppositions that we have adopted. We extrude 
 intellectualism, but not intellect. A mere pitter-patter of 
 imposed activities would not meet this standard any better 
 than a pitter-patter of imposed dogmatic formulae or of memo- 
 rized fragments of Scripture. In short, the Christian law of 
 active, world-wide love is the foundation of Christian instruc- 
 tion as well as of Christian conduct, the foundation not only 
 for selecting material, but also for grading it, the foundation 
 likewise of the pupil's interest in it. 
 
 (5) Finally, this education in the art of brotherhood contains 
 within itself the most mtal of all possible methods of evoki7ig faith 
 in a fatherly God and in a human destiny that outreaches all the 
 accidents of our frailty. Let it be freely granted that less social 
 methods of education can induce children, and men also, to 
 confess without a shadow of insincerity a belief in God and in 
 the life everlasting, and even that beliefs thus acquired may 
 grow, and deepen, and enter creatively into conduct. To say 
 that there is a still more vital way is not the same as saying that 
 all ways except one are bad. Our practical concern, however, 
 is not merely to produce sincere belief in God and immortality, 
 but to make our pupils yearn for God and for the complete 
 triumph of his social desire. In our capacity for loving, which 
 is the same as our capacity to desire complete justice, lies the 
 possibility of a faith that is not merely an intellectual ante- 
 chamber of the divine presence, but a faith that is one with 
 divine fellowship itself. In the spirit of the writer of the First 
 Epistle of John, which is the spirit of Jesus also, we may frankly 
 question whether it is important to cultivate in the young any 
 belief in God that can coexist in the same person with deafness 
 to the human cry. Is not any such belief actually dangerous 
 to society? History shows that belief in God may be used to 
 sanctify and strengthen unjust social ordinances and authorities, 
 and that from this possibility even belief that sincerely regards 
 itself as Christian is by no means exempt. 
 
 If it be possible thus to fuse love and faith, so that even in 
 childhood the voice of God and the voice of human need shall 
 be one voice, this is the path that religious education should by 
 
84 THE PROCESS 
 
 all means choose. It is possible. As Mrs. Mumford's experi- 
 ments show/ the small child's first prayer can be a genuinely 
 social reaction, and he can be led directly forward in the identi- 
 fication of his fellowship with God with his fellowship with 
 men. In a considerable number of Sunday schools the social 
 approach to God already begins to control the teaching about 
 him. A child compared two Sunday schools as follows: "In 
 that one they teach you all about God; in this one they teach 
 you to help God." We are still in the beginnings of such in- 
 struction, of course, and much experimentation, with many 
 blunders, is still before us. But the way ought by this time 
 to be known. It is the way of love, which is the whole law, not 
 only of the deeds that are worth doing, but also of the beliefs 
 that are worth holding. In religious education as elsewhere 
 love never faileth, and in the triunity of faith, hope, and love, 
 it is supreme. 
 
 1 E. E. R. Mumford, The Dawn of Religion in the Mind of the Child (London, 
 1915). 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 THE CHURCH AS EDUCATOR 
 
 The religious dependence of the individual. In all our 
 common human interests that which the individual achieves 
 and that which society contributes to him are inextricably 
 intertwined. They are more than intertwined; the relation 
 is Hke that of a leaf to the trunk of the tree that bears it. We 
 see this clearly in the poHtical attitudes of a free citizen; how- 
 ever free may be his thinking, his convictions are a result of his- 
 torical processes and of association with some existing group. 
 This is not less true of religion, which is historically an affair 
 of groups — tribes, nations, churches, and parties — and of drifts 
 within and without the churches. Our religious progressives, 
 mugwumps, indifferentists, and even secularists, as well as the 
 conservatives and reactionaries, are incarnations of group 
 sentiments. Even the self-made man obtains material and 
 design to a large extent from the social medium in which he 
 moves. 
 
 No church is made up of men and women who belong to it 
 simply because of their individually reasoned-out convictions. 
 No; a church makes its members more than the members 
 make the church. This fact — the infusion of social sap in what 
 we nevertheless rightly call individual — is the net remainder 
 of the mediaeval realistic notion that the church is the prius of 
 its members, or the eternal "form" of which they are the 
 "matter." Here is authority in its inevitable actuality; rea- 
 soned or unreasoned, intended or unintended, it is here by 
 virtue of the fact that men move in groups. But, as we shall 
 see, this does not imply that one part of a group must be pas- 
 sively moulded by another part. 
 
 85 
 
86 THE CHURCH 
 
 The church considered as an instance of " social hered- 
 ity." The term "social heredity '^ has been invented to desig- 
 nate the fact that acquired characters of a mental sort are 
 passed on from generation to generation without any necessary 
 dependence upon our prevision or planning.^ They are not 
 transmitted in the procreative process, of course, but by non- 
 deliberative mental processes of which suggestion is the type. 
 Thus it is that numberless modes of action, feeling, and thought 
 that have the appearance of being instinctive, or self-evident, 
 are in reality matters of habit. Our sense of propriety as to 
 this or that, our conscientious feelings as to this or that con- 
 duct, a mass of preferences that seem to be almost as inevi- 
 table as gravitation, a large proportion of the things that we 
 regard either as self-evident or as absurd, might have been other- 
 wise; they are otherwise in other times and among other peo- 
 ples. However they got started, they continue from genera- 
 tion to generation by reason of continuous pressure from the 
 set ways of older persons upon the plastic minds of the young.^ 
 
 Our social inheritance includes a vast number of man-ways, 
 from the merest trifles to the most momentous concerns of 
 peoples and of humanity itself. Satire has found its happy 
 hunting-ground in our subservience to conventions. Who but 
 a very inferior, or else a very exalted, person, male or female, 
 dares to dress as comfort and common sense dictate? The 
 starched collars that plague my neck are a yoke of servitude; 
 I would put them away if I were strong enough. And I would 
 emancipate myself from stiff head-gear, and from coats during 
 the torrid days of summer, and instead of limiting myself to 
 the sombre colors of conventional male attire, I would learn 
 color schemes from leaves and blossoms, from sea, sky, and 
 cloud, from sunrises and rainbows — if I dared ! 
 
 »J. M. Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations (1906), chap. II, and 
 Appendix A. There are disadvantages in the use of "heredity" in any but a 
 strictly physiological sense, but I permit myself the liberty because a specific 
 term is needed, and no better one has been suggested. 
 
 2 The manner in which things-as-they-are tend to become presuppositions 
 of our thought as to how they ought to be is well illustrated by this incident: 
 A gentleman who resides in a state that has recently granted the franchise to 
 women remarked: "Now that we have actually seen women voting, it seems 
 natural enough, and the wonder is that we ever thought otherwise !" 
 
THE CHURCH 87 
 
 Our religious convictions, whether they are true or not, and 
 even our passionate aspirations, arise within us and become 
 fixed as the meaning of hfe for us very largely because there 
 are churches. A church is an educational institution primarily 
 because of this kind of fact, because, in short, by its very pres- 
 ence, it produces so largely the presuppositions of social think- 
 ing, and maintains a great body of standards that are taken 
 for granted. 
 
 The interplay of social purpose with social suggestion 
 in the churches. The fact that " what is " thus easily and spon- 
 taneously transforms itself in our minds into "what ought to 
 be," or at least into "what is natural," gives rise to the need 
 for some provision for an ever-recurring re-examination of stand- 
 ards, with resultant revision and freshening of life's enterprise. 
 Convention, institutionalism, and vested interests are always 
 ready, in religion as elsewhere, to suffocate the spirit as well 
 as to serve it. The church of the spirit must therefore provide 
 means and measures for continual spiritual renewal at the sources 
 of spiritual life. To education in the non-technical sense of 
 transmission of standards by suggestion, must be added educa- 
 tion in the technical sense of deliberate choice of what shall be 
 transmitted, and systematic procedures for securing effective 
 transmission. But this involves, as a phase of the church's 
 educational vocation, ever-repeated re-examination of her own 
 conduct. 
 
 It is easy to deceive ourselves as to what the church is doing 
 with the young. Because we put edifying words into a text- 
 book or into the mouths of teachers, we imagine that we are 
 putting the whole weight of the church upon the side of ideal 
 goodness. Not so ! What the church is — to paraphrase 
 Emerson's epigram — speaks so loudly that the young do not 
 hear what the church says. Social assumptions that are un- 
 expressed in words but lived out in conduct modify and inter- 
 pret every ethical formula. When we who pray to God as 
 Father, and call humanity a family, and exalt the idea of ser- 
 vice, nevertheless take unprotesting comfort in the anti- 
 domestic, unbrotherly, caste-like inequalities of opportunity 
 
88 THE CHURCH 
 
 that prevail in the world, then, however unconscious we may be 
 of compromising our religion, we actually become teachers of 
 an anti-Christian ethic. A teacher of a Sunday-school class 
 of self-supporting young women said: "Many of my working 
 girls do not grasp the ideal of the Consumers League, for they 
 have never consciously known persons who sacrificed their own 
 comfort in commercial transactions that persons less fortunate 
 with whom they were unacquainted might be benefited." 
 
 Therefore the church's conscious selection of what is to be 
 presented to the young ought to extend beyond and below all 
 lesson material, all school activities, and all devotional exer- 
 cises, even to the social setting of the whole in our present life. 
 If the social setting of Sunday-school experience produces in the 
 pupil no sense of a social contrast between the church and the 
 world, no awareness that there is going on within the church 
 the self-criticism through which alone it can emancipate itself 
 from its limited sociality, no realization that church life means 
 per se agonizing for a better social order, then the church it- 
 self becomes an agency for perpetuating the unbrotherliness 
 that its words condemn. There is even a possibility — a cer- 
 tainty, rather — that individuals, if not whole ecclesiastical 
 groups, will attach a divine sanctity to civil laws and social 
 incrustations that actually hinder the love that is justice. 
 
 The chtirch as a fellowship of old and young. We may 
 now go as far as to assert that the church, considered as educa- 
 tor, is primarily a fellowship of older and younger persons, 
 and that if this fellowship be rich and aspiring it will be educa- 
 tionally effective, whatever be the material and the method 
 of instruction. Our purpose should be, of course, to make the 
 fellowship and the instruction one consistent whole, one move- 
 ment toward the same point; but it is well to remind ourselves 
 that fellowship on the plane of the social principles of Jesus, 
 even if it be joined with defective instruction, has far more 
 power to develop actual Christian living in the young than the 
 best of instruction can have if it be separated from the living 
 word, which is human love in actual operation. 
 
 Thus it comes to pass that church education at its best is an 
 
THE CHURCH 89 
 
 initiation into a living fellowship, being in this respect a true 
 successor of ancient tribal initiations. But wherein does a 
 truly educational fellowship on the Christian plane consist? 
 This deserves careful study, for good will can miss its way by 
 misunderstanding itself. 
 
 (1) Christian fellowship is, in the first place, "good-fellow- 
 ship,'' or having pleasures in common, and heightening them by 
 the very fact that they are enjoyed together. Pleasurable experi- 
 ences are a fundamentally necessary part of the child's acquain- 
 tance with the church. They are necessary because, since 
 satisfaction in any act tends toward the repetition of it, they 
 help toward habit formation. Training is most effective when 
 it takes place in a pervasive atmosphere of cheer, amiability, 
 and happy expectancy. Training in Christian living is most 
 effective when its activities include the present sharing of 
 pleasures, that is, present Christian living. The happiest expe- 
 riences of the young should be found first of all in the family, 
 but next in the church. 
 
 (2) Good fellowship in the church is itself a process of Chris- 
 tian education ; it is not to be used as mere bait wherewith to in- 
 duce the young to submit to an education that is not to their 
 taste. The church has a direct interest, not merely a derived 
 one, in play and frolic, in the interplay of the sexes that leads 
 up to courtship and marriage, and in the cultivation of acquain- 
 tance just because persons as such are worth knowing. There 
 are few developments of religious life in modern times as signifi- 
 cant as the little-heralded introduction of play into the churches. 
 What, a church at play? What would our spiritual fathers 
 say to it? Here are Sunday-school baseball-teams, with ref- 
 erences thereto from the sacred desk on Sunday 1 Here are 
 cooking-stoves and kitchens in the churches, and club-rooms, 
 and gymnasiums, and swimming-tanks ! Well, whatever the 
 fathers might say, the voice of love declares that wherever and 
 however we enrich human fellowship on the simple, democratic 
 plane of regard for men as such, we do the will of the Father, 
 we bring nearer the world-wide realization of the democracy of 
 God. 
 
90 THE CHURCH 
 
 (3) Christian fellowship, though it start on the plane of a child's 
 fondness for play, must continuously grow into community of 
 purposeful labor — covimunity not merely between children, or 
 between children and their respective teachers, but between all the 
 members of the church group, both old and young. " Come, let us 
 live with our children/* said Froebel. We are accustomed to 
 apply this to parents and teachers, but it is applicable also to 
 any social institution that brings children and adults into 
 contact with each other. To live religiously and ecclesiastically 
 with the young means to play with them, but it means also to 
 let them work with us. It implies that we lay responsibilities 
 upon them — real, not imitation responsibilities — that we train 
 them in initiative by giving them initiative, and that we de- 
 velop their judgment by letting them into the inside of church 
 affairs. In many churches there exists a social stratification 
 based upon age that works directly against effective training in 
 church activities. 
 
 (4) At the risk of repetition let it be said that fellowship with 
 the young does not consist in giving gifts, or in providing privileges, 
 or in promoting the social happiness of the young as a class by 
 itself, or even in promoting good works on the part of such a class. 
 These ought we to do, but not to leave the other undone. The 
 elder must give themselves to the younger. " I want not yours, 
 but you !" is the appeal of young life to maturity. The appeal 
 is partly responded to when maturity plays with children and 
 youth, but the response is not complete until the experience of 
 the child in the church, from the kindergarten age onward, 
 includes continuous and growing participation in the most 
 serious purposes, labors, and deliberations of the mature mem- 
 bers and leaders. 
 
 (5) All this implies, without doubt, some reversal of traditions. 
 In some Protestant quarters children have been expected to 
 remain outside the fellowship until some indefinite future. 
 Even the formal doctrine that they are within the fellowship 
 has not always produced real community life, but rather par- 
 ticipation in the symbols of it, or even less than this. Some- 
 what generally the church has made itself a schoolmasterish 
 
THE CHURCH 91 
 
 setter of formal lessons, or a judge and rebuker of faults, or a 
 regulator of amusements, rather than a coworker. Not seldom 
 the young look upon the church as an administrator of mysteries 
 that are solemnly remote from social joys. Every one of these 
 traditions is anti-educational. To overcome them will require 
 one measure in one communion, another in another, according 
 to varying ecclesiastical constitutions, laws, and customs. 
 
 (6) Finally, when felloivship of old and young in social joys, in 
 purpose, and in labor becomes the basal thing in the educational 
 policy of the churches, we shall lay the indispensable corner-stone 
 of Christian unity. The disunion within our religion goes far 
 deeper than multiplicity of independent administrations, di- 
 versity of doctrinal standards, and contrasting modes of wor- 
 ship. Nothing less is involved than the fundamental impulses 
 and attitudes upon which society itself depends, and specifically 
 those upon which alone a democracy of God could possibly be 
 built. Do we not lack in all the churches a social purpose so 
 profound that young as well as old can appreciate it ? For in "^ 
 truth that which can produce genuine Christian unity between 
 youth and maturity is the fundamentals, such as active desire 
 that everybody should have enough to eat, that everybody 
 should be protected from disease, that all the sick should be 
 cared for, that everybody should have friends, that everybody 
 should have opportunity for education and for enjoyment of the 
 finest products of the human mind, that children and youth 
 should everywhere be protected from vicious influences, that 
 war should cease, and that the Father should be able at last to 
 look upon human society and say: "Behold, it is very good !"^ 
 
 It is because we are not ready to unite with children in such 
 fundamental, socially reconstructive purposes that we ransack 
 history for a basis for Christian union. It is the future, the 
 unfulfilled task, the unreserving love of men, the yearning 
 
 1 The capacity of children to appreciate the simple justice that is profound 
 has been remarked again and again. A very small boy who was eating the 
 inside of his slice of bread, but rejecting the crusts, was told: "There are lots 
 of Uttle cliildren who would be glad to get as much as a crust of bread. They 
 sometimes pick over the refuse in garbage cans in order to obtain food." The 
 young thinker, with a worried expression, replied: "Why doesn't the Heavenly 
 Father give them enough to eat?" 
 
92 THE CHURCH 
 
 desire of the Father that all men should be one family; it is 
 common objective purpose and labor, that must heal our divi- 
 sions. When we have raised a generation or two of church- 
 members united with one another in their various denomina- 
 tions upon this basis, we shall find the barriers between denomi- 
 nations very, very thin. 
 
 The church as a worshipping society. If what has just 
 been said leads to the question wherein, then, the church 
 differs from any other organization of the good will, and why a 
 child needs any social training beyond participation in ordinary 
 philanthropies and reforms, the answer is that, in spite of 
 shortcomings, the churches, and they only of all our social 
 institutions, undertake to accept the radical consequences of 
 Jesus' social idealism. They have adopted — let us say it 
 frankly — a point of view that leads to consequences that they 
 did not at first foresee, consequences the portent of which even 
 now we feel more than we can define. We Christians have a 
 sad smile to-day for the simple-mindedness that could believe 
 that the missionary task would be essentially completed when 
 everybody on earth had been told something. We are beginning 
 to face the appalling duty of building a world civilization based 
 squarely, uncompromisingly, upon the proposition that all 
 men are brothers; and we are beginning to see that our fellow- 
 ship with the Father — th e whole problem of worship — is tied 
 up with our relations to this enterprise. We have, then, 
 two aspects of the church as a worshipping society that are of 
 the first importance for religious education. 
 
 (1) The peculiar significance of the church as educator is found, 
 in the first place, in the comprehensiveness and the radicalness of 
 the pr inciple ^f }j,^imnr, f^JJf^ff^j^Jijj^ that it professes. Go over in 
 your mind all other groups and group activities that aim at 
 the betterment of mankind, including the state, the state schools, 
 the most social-minded political party that you know, the re- 
 form organizations, philanthropic agencies of all kinds, institu- 
 tions for research and for teaching, and for aesthetic and social 
 enjoyment. What a magnificent array it is ! What a tonic 
 for our faith in man! No enlightened Christian but thanks 
 
THE CHURCH 93 
 
 God for these forces that are all helping to bring us onward 
 toward a real brotherhood. The function of religious education 
 with respect to them is to raise up intelligent supporters for every 
 effective humanitarian and socializing agency. Yet the fact 
 remains that each of these group activities — wisely enough, 
 no doubt — declines to contemplate man as man in his total 
 need; no one insists upon complete justice, but only upon 
 justice in some restricted sphere; every one puts off upon 
 somebody else the declaring of what brotherhood in its uncom- 
 promising wholeness means; no one proposes the radical deal- 
 ing with human nature, the reconstruction of motive, that is 
 involved in effective brotherhood; no one goes with men into 
 and through the deepest valleys of sorrow and the poignant 
 issues of destiny. 
 
 But the churches mean to undertake this. They are, of 
 course, beset with human frailty and error, but we criticise 
 their defects precisely from the standpoint of their own avowed 
 principles. They have in fact taken into their hands a sword 
 that pierces their own bosom, and it is their hold upon this 
 sword that gives them a peculiar function in social educa- 
 tion. The Christ-spirit within us urges us to believe in man to 
 the utmost, holding that any human life outweighs all possible 
 private profits; to believe in loving to the utmost, and that only 
 by losing our lives as merely individual can we have fulness of 
 life; to believe in the possibility of purifying the motives of 
 men until selfishness is really eradicated; to believe that a 
 divinely good social order is possible on earth; to believe that the 
 apparent defeat of love by death can be swallowed up in a greater 
 victory of love, and to be unabashed by the tragedy and the 
 mystery before which so many social forces shrink; and in all 
 this to remember that we are not going to war at our own 
 charges — the charges of our imperfect wisdom, and of the pov- 
 erty of our resources — but that the eternal God is herein utter- 
 ing in us a love that will not be denied. The churches are called 
 by their own avowed principles to carry this social radicalism 
 into life. They are to be quick to provide for any unfilled social 
 need, but they are also to work within all constructive social 
 
94 THE CHURCH 
 
 agencies, and to inspire them to believe in brotherhood to the 
 utmost, that is, to be as radically social as their respective limi- 
 tations permit. This spirit of loving to the uttermost, which 
 is likewise the spirit of self-criticism to the uttermost, is the first 
 thing that specifically Christian education adds to the other 
 agencies of social progress. 
 
 (2) The peculiar significance of the church as educator is found, 
 in the second place, in its maintenance of ivorship of the Father, 
 the source and the present inspirer of the love that, because it 
 will brook no limits, is so terrifyingly just. There is no break, 
 or partition, or point of transition, between the Christian's 
 friendship with men and his friendship with God. Hence the 
 significance of common worship. Communion of man with 
 man reaches its climax only when the human is felt to contain 
 the divine. Emerson called this the experience of "the Over- 
 soul." The continuity of love with worship manifests itself 
 variously. Parental and conjugal affection in their purest and 
 most elevated self-consciousness feel something of awe, of 
 reverence, of fulfilling a mission. Though our formulated faiths 
 grow weak, duty goes on speaking to us as "Stern daughter of 
 the voice of God." When our sympathy enters most unre- 
 servedly — that is, with the eyes of justice — into the woes of 
 the world, then in the very depths of the dark valley there de- 
 scend upon us elevation of spirit, illumination of the world 
 darkness, a realization of an encompassing One as rejoicing 
 within us. 
 
 The common worship of Christians is ideally, and to some 
 extent actually, the fostering of this communion, which is at 
 once human and divine — most human because it is divine, most 
 divine because it is incarnate. When we worship together we 
 remind ourselves of this God — our God; we reflect upon his 
 goodness, so outgoing, self-giving, all-encompassing, and upon 
 the ways in which it has unfolded itself to us, particularly upon 
 Jesus; in the light of the goodness of God our pettiness and 
 self-centredness are held before us until we repent and set 
 about removing the inner obstacles that obstruct the utter- 
 ance of divine love through us to our fellows; here, pausing from 
 
THE CHURCH 95 
 
 the multiplicity of affairs to seek a central, organizing principle 
 for them all, and lifting our eyes from the particular stitches 
 that we have been taking in the flowing garment of divinity 
 in order that we may contemplate the garment itself, we find 
 meaning, rationality. In our existence; rationality, however, 
 not as something static, not as something to be merely gazed 
 at and admired, but rationality as direction for our forces, as 
 effort that is satisfied to be effort, as labor that asks for no idle- 
 ness as its reward, as suffering with and for others that does not 
 count itself as loss, as purpose that is large enough. 
 
 Christian worship is thus realization of the democracy of 
 God — realization by imagination, by fresh insights, by recti- 
 fication of purposes, by the coincident consciousness of God and 
 our fellows — nay, the interfused consciousness of them, the 
 consciousness of God as here and now Incarnating himself In us 
 as a society. When worship is fully Christian it is fellowship 
 through and through, fellowship freeing Itself from all restraints, 
 and therefore continuous with everything in the world that 
 makes for brotherhood. 
 
 Such worship has tremendous educational possibilities. They 
 are to be realized partly by suggestion in words reinforced by 
 music, by architectural beauty, and especially by the presence 
 of a whole congregation that Is attending to the same things 
 and performing outward acts in unison. But both method and 
 content of such suggestion need careful scrutiny in order that 
 the congregation may be led away from the crowd type of 
 consciousness into that of the deliberative group. How is this 
 to be done? By ever fresh applications of the ancient Chris- 
 tian doctrine that God is made manifest in human life. To 
 see life objectively, discriminatingly, and to reflect upon what 
 we, with God, want it to be — this is of the essence of Christian 
 worship. When we resort to the church to escape from the 
 problems and the perplexities of human society, we do not fol- 
 low the Christ who ever takes upon himself the form of man, 
 ever becomes the servant of man. Worship as escape from this 
 degenerates into non-Christian crowd sesthetlcism or else into 
 non-Christian clubdom. 
 
96 THE CHURCH 
 
 Again, when worship has its centre in priestly manipulation 
 of supernatural mysteries, it uses suggestion as an instrument 
 for keeping the many obedient to the few, and for repeating 
 the past instead of using the past as material wherewith to 
 build fairer structures of the spirit of brotherhood. The 
 methods of suggestion can be used either to hold children at the 
 crowd level, or to produce the sort of pause that leads to reflec- 
 tion, and to bring to attention objective material upon which 
 a deliberate social will can be formed. In short, true to the 
 meaning of incarnation, worship can develop communion with 
 God in and through growing social intelligence and growing 
 social purpose, as these, conversely, can be developed through 
 communion with God. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 A NEW THEORY OF THE CURRICULUM 
 
 The elements of the problem. At one point and another 
 our discussion has aheady touched upon the curriculum, either 
 explicitly, or by way of implication. But not until now have 
 all the elements of the problem been before us. Broadly con- 
 sidered, the problem to which our discussion has led us is this : 
 How to plan a progressive order for the pupil's social reactions — 
 progressive in the sense of moving toward and into the full, 
 intelligent, active sociality of Christian maturity. Such a 
 plan would constitute a curriculum. 
 
 This social and functional conception of a "course of study" 
 is fundamentally at variance with our traditions. Until very 
 recently "curriculum" has implied that we formulate a body of 
 ideas that we wish to impose upon the pupil, arrange an order 
 in which they are to be learned, and plan ways for inducing him 
 to attend to them. This, which may be called the "imposition 
 theory" of the curriculum, grew out of and expressed the 
 individualistic view of salvation, which was at the same time an 
 intellectualistic view of the faith that saves. Not that any 
 consistency was achieved in practice. Quite the contrary. 
 After telling the things that must surely be believed unto salva- 
 tion, the teacher still felt and knew that the task of Christianiz- 
 ing the heart remained over. Hence the assiduity with which 
 "applications" were appended to every piece of curriculum 
 material. Hence also the overemphasis upon the personality 
 of the teacher, and the resort to beguilements, persuasions, and 
 emotional pressure to induce pupils to be religious, all of which 
 testifies to a cleft between curriculum and life. 
 
 The point of view that we have now reached in the present 
 discussion bases the very notion of curriculum upon the vital 
 
 97 
 
98 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 reactions that the older scheme merely appended to the course 
 of study. The new theory unreservedly accepts the truth that 
 out of the heart are the issues of life, and that consequently a 
 - curriculum is not primarily a systematic set of ideas, but a 
 -J progressive order of motives actually at work, actually fruiting 
 here and now. The elements that have to be considered may 
 be stated in a chain as follows: 
 
 (a) To help the pupil to experience growing communion with 
 God. 
 
 (6) In and through growing human fellowships in the family, 
 the church, and elsewhere. 
 
 (c) Fellowship in the act of worship, with the help of music 
 and the other arts. 
 
 {d) And in constructive and remedial social activities. 
 
 {e) Which include the missionary enterprise, but expand it. 
 
 (/) All of which requires constant and growing discrimination, 
 foresight, and deliberation. 
 
 {g) And for this reason calls for illumination from Scripture, 
 history, doctrines, science, current events, and the creations of 
 imagination. 
 
 Under the concept of curriculum we are to think of the pupil 
 as moving thus through social experiences; of these experiences 
 as arising in active dealings with real situations of the present; 
 as including the rise of intelligent social purposes ; as coming in 
 a prearranged order that is governed by the growth of the pupil's 
 social capacities, and as including human and divine fellowship 
 in a single whole. Fundamentally, then, the curriculum is a 
 com-se of living, not a course in supposed preliminaries to real 
 life. 
 
 The pre-social view of the curriculum. Before going on to 
 further exposition of the implications of such a socialized curric- 
 ulum, let us pause to realize just where the defects lay in the 
 conception that prevailed in the church's educational yester- 
 day. Here is a wee book entitled Our Daily Guide, or Wise 
 Words for Young Disciples,^ which consists of a text of Scripture 
 
 1 Published by T. Nelson and Sons. It has been in circulation recently, 
 I believe, and very possibly is still on the market. 
 
THE CURRICULUM 99 
 
 and a meditation for each day of the year. " Enter not into the 
 path of the wicked," reads one of the Scripture selections, and 
 the meditation attached to it runs thus: 
 
 "Why should I join with those in play 
 In whom I've no delight; 
 Who curse and swear, but never pray. 
 Who call ill names and fight?" 
 
 Associated with the command, "Remember the Sabbath day, 
 to keep it holy," is this resolution: 
 
 "I'll leave my sport to read and pray, 
 And so prepare for heaven; 
 Oh, may I love this blessed day, 
 The best of all the seven." 
 
 A third specimen is this: "The dead were judged out of those 
 things which were written in the books, according to their 
 works." 
 
 "Then let me always watch my lips. 
 Lest I be struck to death and hell; 
 Since God a book of reckoning keeps 
 For every lie that children tell." 
 
 We are accustomed to dismiss documents like this with a 
 comment upon their dreadful theology. But something more 
 is revealed, even the affinity of individualistic religion, with its 
 worship of an incompletely socialized god, for an educational 
 method that consists in telling and commanding, but not in the 
 growth of motives. The method, as well as the content, 
 isolates the pupil from his fellows and from divine fellowship. 
 The last thing thought of here is that a child might appreciate 
 love or justice or real fellowship of any kind. 
 
 How ingrained the individualistic notion of teaching was, 
 how mechanical were the methods to which it led, and how 
 remote it was from the pupil's real life, may be seen from the 
 
100 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 following questions and "applications," which are quoted from 
 nineteenth-century question-books for use in the Sunday school. 
 
 Date, 1832. Lesson material: Paul and Silas at Thessalonica 
 and Berea (Acts xvii, 1-16). "It was Paul's habit to attend pub- 
 lic worship, ver. 2; — learn, That wherever we are, it is our duty 
 to do the same, nothing can excuse it, but sickness, or some un- 
 avoidable calamity." . . . "Paul reasoned with the Jews, out of 
 the Scriptures, ver. 2; — learn, That the Scriptures are the only 
 sources from which we can draw correct and weighty arguments." 
 . . . "Some of them who heard Paul believed, ver. 4; — ^learn, 
 That truth affects different persons differently." ... It is 
 pleasant to record that this dreariness is not altogether unre- 
 lieved by references to matters that really concern children. 
 Thus, when the text-book reaches the story of the shipwreck, we 
 read: "Many were saved by swimming, ver. 43; — ^learn. That it is 
 useful to learn to swim; our own lives, under God, may some- 
 times be indebted to it; and, besides this, if we know how to swim, 
 we may assist others." ^ 
 
 Date, 1845. A whole lesson is given to the two verses, Matthew 
 xiii, 51 and 52. A few of the questions are as follows: 
 
 "12. How should children treat their religious teachers? Heb. 
 xiii, 7, 17; I Thes. v, 13. 
 
 13. What danger is there in refusing to receive instruction? 
 Mat. X, 14, 15; Pr. v, 23. 
 
 15. Why should you desire to be taught in the truths of the 
 Gospel? IITim. iii, 15. 
 
 16. What is your duty in the Sabbath school?" 
 
 In a lesson on "The Barren Fig Tree," questions like this are 
 asked: "What divine attribute is exhibited in granting to all 
 persons a sufficient reason, and all necessary means of grace?" 
 and the parable of the Prodigal Son is pointed with, "To what 
 great end should all the blessmgs of providence and grace be de- 
 voted?" ^ 
 
 1 A Help to the Acts of the Apostles (Philadelphia: American Sunday School 
 Union, 1832). 
 
 2 J. A. Albro, Scripture Questions, vol. VII, On the Parables of the New Tes- 
 tament. Part I : For the Younger Scholars (Massachusetts Sabbath School So- 
 ciety, Boston, 1845). 
 
THE CURRICULUM 101 
 
 Date, 1862. Here are fifty lessons on the books of Joshua and 
 Judges alone. One lesson is given to Caleb's inheritance, another 
 to Judah's inheritance, and so on. The lesson on the inheritance 
 of the Levites occasions these "Practical Questions": "Where 
 in this lesson do we learn, that: The living of the ministry is not 
 often so great as to tempt men into it for the sake of the compensa- 
 tion ? It is the will of God that the ministry be comfortably sup- 
 ported? I Cor. ix, 13, 14. This support cannot be withheld 
 without displeasing God? ... It is for the convenience of the 
 ministry and the good of the people that they live near the sanc- 
 tuary in which they minister ? " ^ 
 
 Date, 1884. "What have I learned ? " is asked in connection with 
 a lesson on The Thessalonians and Bereans (Acts xvii, 1-14), and 
 the answer is given as follows: 
 
 "1. That the Scriptures tell us what we are to believe and what 
 we are to do. 
 
 2. That it is ignoble to reject and oppose the Scriptures. 
 
 3. That it is noble to receive and study the Scriptures. 
 
 4. That we should search the Scriptures with earnest desire 
 
 to find out just what they teach. 
 
 5. That if we thus study the Scriptures we will be led into the 
 
 truth." 2 
 Date, 1894. "Practical Lessons Learned" from the story of 
 Cain and Abel are as follows: 
 "1. We should bring om* best gifts to God. 
 
 2. We should offer them in faith in Christ. 
 
 3. We should beware of envy, jealousy, and anger. 
 
 4. Passion in heart leads to sin in life. 
 
 5. We should seek pardon through Christ, the only Savior." ^ 
 
 What a valley of dry bones is this ! How unreligious it 
 is ! The reform of the curriculum that set in early in the 
 present century was fundamentally a religious reform. It 
 was an attempt to remove paraphernalia, mistakenly supposed 
 to be educational, that had been interposed between the child 
 and religion. The spirit of the new movement is dominated 
 by faith in the possibility of child religion and of growth in 
 
 1 John Todd, A Question Book embracing Books of Joshua and Judges for 
 Sabbath Schools and Bible Classes (Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, 
 Boston, 1862). 
 
 2 Westminster Question Book, 1884. 
 
 • Westminster Question Book for Teachers and Older Scholars, 1894. 
 
102 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 religion. Let us have religion itself, it says, not these deaden- 
 ing reiterations about it; let us help children to be Christian 
 now, each in his personal world, however narrow it may be, and 
 let us understand that herein the teaching of religion con- 
 sists. This is the direction in which the reform of religious 
 education is going. Many steps will have to be taken before 
 our courses of talk about religion are wholly transformed into 
 courses in religious living, we may be sure. Therefore let us 
 go a little farther into the theory of the matter. 
 
 The primary "content of the curriculum" is to be found 
 in present relations and interactions between persons. The 
 curriculum, we have agreed, is to be a scheme of growth in 
 social motives that are actually in operation as the pupil goes 
 along. The essence of teaching, then, will lie in leading the 
 pupil to make experiments in social living whereby he shall 
 know for himself, not merely by the hearing of the ear, the 
 meaning and the validity of the ancient law of love which is 
 also the law of justice. With children as with adults the doing 
 of God's will is the true way to insight. How, then, can the 
 pupil be led to make experiments in the organization of his 
 little social world upon the principle of good will and justice? 
 Not by the old method of telling and commanding, but pri- 
 marily through the attraction that he finds in persons who 
 already live socially in his own environment. It is "living 
 epistles, " known and read in family, church, or Sunday school 
 that first make Christian fellowship a reality to him. This 
 initial, pleasurable experience is what produces the momentum 
 for carrying the principle of fellowship into other groups. In 
 order to lift this process above mere imitation, mere good- 
 natured drift, which lacks aggressiveness and power of achieve- 
 ment in difficult situations, the pupil's attention must be turned 
 to these situations so that he shall discriminate differences, 
 recognize problems, and see causal relations. That is, to study 
 "the way" is primarily to notice the differences that exist here 
 and now between social relations that are governed by active 
 love and those that are not thus governed. 
 
 This proposition does not ignore or minimize the significance 
 
THE CURRICULUM 103 
 
 of historical material, but points, rather, to the vital, experiential 
 way of using it. How, indeed, can the past be anything to us 
 but a "dead past" until we discover by our own experiments 
 that there is continuity between the living and the dead? As 
 a matter of fact, the Bible, even parts of it that quiver with 
 imperishable human interest, are to-day dead and inert things 
 to multitudes because their approach was that of the old- 
 fashioned curriculum. The very attempt to exalt the Bible 
 devitalized it, concealed it, by making it a thing per se, to be 
 first known apart from experience and only afterward applied 
 in experience. The sparkle of its high lights, and the gloom of 
 its shadows were missed alike, because it was all there merely 
 to be learned, all on a dead level. Similar waste of precious 
 power for living will always occur when "curriculum" means 
 facing the pupil toward the far-away, the inexperienced, instead 
 of toward present demonstrations of the meaning and the 
 power of love. The word that gives life is always that which 
 is made flesh, and dwells among men. "I in them, and thou 
 in me, that they may be perfected into one; that the world 
 may know that thou didst send me, and lovedst them, even 
 as thou lovedst me." 
 
 When we thus transform the curriculum into a graded series "] 
 of experiments in social living, making the present relations 
 and interactions between persons the primary objects of study, 
 not only shall we vitalize the parts of history that are of real 
 religious importance, we shall also have a corrective for the 
 present abstractness of much of our teaching. A notion is 
 abroad that almost identifies the teaching of morals and re- 
 ligion with inducing pupils to analyze qualities of character 
 or to discriminate the virtues one from another. "What sort 
 of man was Abraham?" asks the teacher, and the pupil replies: 
 "He was a man of faith," or "He was generous." Sometimes 
 the questions run : " What do we call a man who conducts him- 
 self in this way? Yes, we call him generous," etc., etc. Ex- 
 tended plans have been made for moving on from one such 
 quality or virtue to another until a whole galaxy of virtues has 
 been telescopically viewed and mapped. 
 
104 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 We need not deny all value to such study. The pupil's 
 imaginative contact with good men is not likely to be altogether 
 useless, and the acquisition of an ethical vocabulary is cer- 
 tainly desirable. Yet the fact remains that the really important 
 thing about Abraham is his contribution to a certain social- 
 religious movement. The American boy who moves in imagina- 
 tion with Abraham should move with him toward defined 
 social objectives, should be made to realize the difference that 
 the life of the patriarch made for other persons. Studying 
 virtues is not the same as studying men in their social relations. 
 We may glorify a virtue at the very moment that we forget men. 
 
 Dissecting virtues, moreover, does not necessarily make 
 them attractive, even in their abstractness. Some inkling of 
 further need is revealed in questions like these : " What do you 
 admire in Abraham?" and "Which is your favorite character 
 among all those that we have studied this quarter, and why?" 
 Even if a virtue is made attractive, toward what, in terms 
 of concrete living, is the pupil drawn? Suppose that we have 
 produced admiration for generosity; there remains the question: 
 In what way have we modified the pupil's purposes ? Have we 
 merely caused him to desire a share in the praise that is due to 
 the generous? The desire to be "good" may be a subtle form 
 of self-seeking. The desires and purposes that are worth awak- 
 ening are those that consciously connect others with oneself 
 in some scheme of objective good, such as welfare, justice, or a 
 broader fellowship. 
 
 As long as one keeps one's attention upon inner and private 
 qualities, instead of keeping it upon the effects of this or that 
 conduct upon specific human beings, one can escape the sense 
 of responsibility for the social order of which one is a member. 
 Who does not know that fine personal qualities may be wide- 
 spread in a socially lethargic community or church? When 
 has "good man" had the connotation of caring for even rudi- 
 mentary justice ? A community in which, in spite of an abun- 
 dant food-supply, many children lack sufficient nourishment 
 to enable them to do their school work may contain any num- 
 ber of kindly, comfortable citizens to whom such a glaring in- 
 
THE CURRICULUM 105 
 
 justice never comes home as having anything to do with their 
 character. They are "good" men, they have "virtues" many 
 and genuine, they are not hypocrites; yet something funda- 
 mental is lacking. This lack will not be made good by adding 
 another "virtue" to their private stock. The whole method 
 of their ethical thinking must be reconstructed. They must 
 approach duty by a different route. The question of con- 
 science should be: What persons are affected by my acts, or by 
 my failures to act, and how are they affected ? I am a part of 
 a system of ethical nerves that reaches every member of the 
 community, and binds all into an interdependent whole. 
 
 It requires no great acuity of vision, but only pausing and 
 looking, to see that economic interdependence is at the same 
 time ethical relatedness. In every bargain that I make, in 
 every article that I use or consume, I traffic in human energies 
 as well as in things, I relate myself to the health and happiness 
 of men and women whom I have never seen, I take part in 
 making their children what they become. To assume full re- 
 sponsibility for these acts of mine, to form a habit of seeing so- 
 ciety as it is, and of tracing social causes and effects, and to 
 think my very own moral life in community terms — these are 
 the rudiments of an awakened, mature Christian conscience. 
 The road toward such maturity is, obviously, training in analysis 
 and in appreciation of human life in its present interrelated- 
 ness, and practice in making human relations those of a genuine 
 fellowship.^ 
 
 The changing social situations incident to the pupil's 
 growth, with their inevitable problems of social adjustment, 
 furnish a basis for the order and the use of the material. 
 The social life of a child begins in a narrow circle, widens into 
 larger and larger circles, and becomes a complex of interpene- 
 trating circles. What but this movement of social enlarge- 
 ment and complication could determine the order of the ma- - 
 terial in a really socialized curriculum? Family life, play life, 
 school life, civic life, occupation, marriage — here is a progressive 
 
 1 The psychological phase of this matter will be discussed more at length in 
 Chapter XIV. 
 
106 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 order that is also a natural social order. A brief analysis of 
 the educational problems presented by one or two of these situa- 
 tions will serve to make clear the principle of arrangement and 
 of use. 
 
 Under normal conditions a child begins his social experi- 
 ence in a family. Here parental love, starting in instinct, 
 but going on to reflective devotion, becomes the first revela- 
 tion of the law of love. It does so by the utterly concrete 
 method of attaching the child, by means of his pleasures, to 
 his parents and to the other members of the household. Here 
 is presented the first material for systematic religious educa- 
 tion. The objects for study are father and mother, the other 
 children, the domestic helpers, and the purveyors to the fam- 
 ily's needs, in their respective activities as these affect the mu- 
 tual happiness. The inclusion of the divine Father in this 
 group comes naturally as expressing a fellowship of obedience 
 in which the older and the younger share. In a group in which 
 the full enfranchisement of some of the members is not yet 
 possible, there is danger of undemocratic rule and undemocratic 
 subjection. The common Fatherhood here serves as a democ- 
 ratizing principle. It is to be referred to and wrought into 
 the child's daily consciousness, not as an importation from 
 outside the daily family life, not as an individual possession of 
 the child, or as an imposition upon his will, but as adding rich 
 meaning to "our" in "our family." 
 
 The child's life in the family extends outward into play 
 groups of members of various families. In a short time the 
 play group buds off and becomes an almost autonomous social 
 life of children with children. Games and plays are handed 
 down from one such group to another for centuries without 
 plan, or record, or adult participation. With the games go 
 codes of conduct. Rather, the rules of each game do of them- 
 selves prescribe one or another sort of self-controlled act in 
 the interest of co-operation, and not seldom penalties for non- 
 co-operation. 
 
 Moreover, children erect standards, sometimes but not al- 
 ways unreflectively, for the conduct that is due from them- 
 
THE CURRICULUM 107 
 
 selves to various classes of persons. There are standards with 
 respect to competitors in games as compared with team-mates;* 
 strange children as contrasted with acquaintances; children of 
 a different economic "class''; older children and younger 
 ones; the school-teacher ;2 the janitor; the street-car conduc- 
 tor ;3 the policeman; persons of other nationalities;^ and per- 
 sons occupying different positions in the industrial scale, as 
 domestic "servants," "common" laborers, and capitalists. 
 We adults often fail to realize that in the child world a child 
 public opinion sustains and even enforces these standards. 
 Here a child finds social reality. Compared with it the advice 
 of an adult is likely to seem cold, unreal, unappreciative. 
 
 We cannot deal adequately with this child society by merely 
 proclaiming better standards, or by appending prohibitions and 
 penalties to the proclamation. Rather, through our fellowship 
 with children we must help child society to find its own possi- 
 bilities of greater happiness. Children's codes will not be the 
 same as those of Christian maturity, in any case, for the range 
 of human relations that can be attended to, and the range of 
 
 » Ask boys who are competing in running races what they think of starting 
 ahead of the pistol. You are likely to find, as I have done, approval of such 
 evasion of rules provided only that one can succeed in it. 
 
 2 1 know of a secondary school in which at one time the maxim, "A Ue to 
 the faculty is not a lie," expressed a common attitude of the boys, even of the 
 more serious minded ones. Even in a well managed elementary school grade 
 steps have been necessary to prevent pupils from altering report-cards sent to 
 parents — "raising" them as a forger raises a check. The point of these 
 instances is not the badness of children, but only their constant tendency to 
 form standards and a pubUc opinion of their own upon the basis of their own 
 too narrow experience. What the teacher has to do is to enlarge the basis 
 for the children's judgment upon social relations. 
 
 3 Using one's wits to get something for nothing has the attraction of ad- 
 venture, of contest, and of conquest. Boys, at least, trade and bargain 
 with one another with a fierceness of cupidity, and sometimes with a trickl- 
 ness, that represent in miniature some features of their elders' system of 
 competitive profit getting. It is not always easy to make a child realize 
 that cheating an impersonal entity like a street-railroad corporation is on the 
 level of plain steaUng. 
 
 * Race prejudices on the part of adults find a fruitful soil in the child mind, 
 which is struck by differences in costimie, speech, and manner, rather than 
 by the less obvious, underlying identities of human natm-e. One of the 
 fine, and like^vise pressing tasks of Christian teachers in many of our centres 
 of population is to help children who already look down upon "sheenies" 
 and "dagoes" (the latest term, I believe, is "guineas") to discover the fine 
 human quahties that these races are contributing to our American Life. 
 
108 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 possible adjustment acts, change with growing years. Never- 
 theless, within the range of childish capacities, immense dif- 
 ferences of code are possible, most important shifts in social 
 pleasures. Here, precisely, is where religious education has 
 its opportunity and its call. Its central function will be to 
 stimulate social experiments of certain kinds within the chil- 
 dren's own world — experiments in which situations will be 
 analyzed as they would not be without adult help, in which 
 acquaintance of children with one another will be deepened, 
 and in which thereby the joys of co-operation, helpfulness, fair 
 play, and justice will be multiplied.^ 
 
 These two examples, the family group and the play group, 
 are sufficient to make clear how the grades or other divisions 
 of a socialized curriculum can grow directly out of the pupil's 
 expanding social experience. It is not necessary to continue 
 this analysis into the child's school life, with its fresh prob- 
 lems of work, of systematized co-operation, and of authority; 
 nor into his growing contacts with the political, industrial, 
 commercial, philanthropic, and cultural institutions of the com- 
 munity; nor into his relations to a life-occupation, nor into his 
 preparation for marriage. It is, however, important to notice 
 that a progressive course in social living takes the form, as far 
 as instruction is concerned, of a series of problems to be solved 
 — problems, let it be noted, not imported into the child's world 
 by the teacher, but already in the enterprises and the joys and 
 sorrows of childhood. Let it be noted, finally, that under 
 this conception of education the teacher does not give the 
 pupils solutions for their problems, but induces the pupils to 
 analyze and experiment so that they reach convictions of their 
 very own. 
 
 How the "social situation" order of the curriculum differs 
 from others. The significance of this new theory of the curric- 
 ulum may be pointed still further by a brief resume of other 
 principles, either practised or proposed, for the arrangement of 
 material. 
 
 1 Compare what was said in Chapter IV concerning the necessity of help- 
 ing children out of the crowd type of association into the deUberative type. 
 
THE CURRICULUM 109 
 
 (1) The part-and-whole arrangement, whereby the Bible or 
 the catechism is simply cut up into a number of parts to corre- 
 spond with certain periods of time, or an abbreviated and sim- 
 plified form (as of the commandments or of the catechism) 
 precedes the complete one. 
 
 (2) The historical arrangement, whereby the pupil first thinks 
 about earlier times, then about later ones, and at last arrives — 
 if, indeed, he ever does arrive — at his own times. 
 
 (3) The supposedly psychological arrangement, whereby spon- 
 taneous interests that are believed to arise in a serial order 
 are to have each its own kind of food in its season. In a later 
 chapter we shall have to touch upon the most extreme form of 
 this theory, which bases the order of the material upon the re- 
 capitulation doctrine of mental growth.^ Here we may point 
 out that in whatever form the supposedly psychological ar- 
 rangement appears it misses or underrates an important factor 
 in children's interests. The fact that some instincts ripen later 
 than others does bring it to pass, indeed, that spontaneous 
 attention shifts in certain matters by reason of a purely in- 
 ternal impulsion. It is true, too, that the mere presence of 
 powers not yet fully employed is a determining factor. 
 
 On the other hand, however, children's characteristic interests 
 are not, on the whole, spontaneous demands for this or that 
 object or for this or that result, but rather for participation in 
 processes of certain types. One of the simplest examples is the 
 interest that is supposed to underlie the voracious hearing and 
 reading of blood-and-thunder tales. Superficial observation 
 may make it appear that suffering and cruelty as such are at- 
 tractive, or that strength applied to immoral pnds is what the 
 child most likes to contemplate, whereas the thing that he is 
 really after is imaginative participation in action that involves 
 rapid changes, stirring contrasts, and simple motives, with 
 the sense of living that such action brings. The action may be 
 cruel or heroic, and the motive and outcome may be noble or 
 base ; the interest is there in either case. 
 
 Moreover, the particular material that attracts the child's 
 
 1 See Chapter XII. 
 
no THE CURRICULUM 
 
 attention, the particular application of his impulses toward 
 participation, is determined in each case in large measure by 
 what the habitual environment offers, and by the kinds of 
 active, overt participation that are open to him. Here, for 
 example, is an only child who has had little contact with other 
 children. When he is brought to the kindergarten he shrinks 
 at first from the very objects and occupations that fascinate 
 the other children. Again, keep a child amused by toys that 
 perform in his presence while he remains little more than a 
 spectator, and you create demands, interests, of a particular 
 kind; pursue the opposite policy from the beginning, provid- 
 ing him with material for self-expression, construction, and 
 initiative, and you create an opposite set of interests. The 
 truth is that there is no serial order of underived interests upon 
 which a curriculum could be organized. We must conform, 
 rather, to the serial order of situations that develop with growth, 
 striving always to develop interests, not merely to feed those that 
 happen to be present already. 
 
 (4) The ecclesiastical arrangement, whereby religious educa- 
 tion is made to consist in a gradual initiation into the worship, 
 the activities, and the beliefs of the church, and into full con- 
 formity to its authority. This is like the part-and-whole prin- 
 ciple of arrangement except that active participation in insti- 
 tutional life is added to "learning about." It is like the 
 "social situation" principle in that it causes the pupil to attend 
 to persons and what they do, and to take for himself a part in 
 the doing. It is unlike it in two respects : It induces the child 
 to conform rather than to experiment, and it introduces him to 
 ready-made solutions instead of introducing him to problems. 
 There is likewise a difference, of emphasis at least, with respect 
 to the relation of the pupil's fellowship in the church to his 
 fellowships in other groups. This point is of so great import 
 that we must pause to consider it for a moment. 
 
 The place of the church in a curriculum of social living. 
 If the content of the curriculum is to consist of the relations 
 between persons in a series of social situations — family, play 
 group, school, etc. — where, it may be asked, does the church 
 
THE CURRICULUM 111 
 
 group come in ? Where does the curriculum introduce the child 
 to the sacred fellowship and the common worship of the avowed 
 disciples of Jesus Christ ? 
 
 The main alternatives that need to be considered may be 
 indicated by these questions: Shall the child's ecclesiastical 
 experience be treated as a particular social sphere co-ordinate 
 with others, as the family and the state, but having a different 
 principle of fellowship or a different set of problems to work 
 out; or, shall the child experience the church fellowship as a 
 specially earnest, co-operative effort to work out the very prob- 
 lems that arise in the family and in the other social situations 
 that have been named? Again, shall the child experience the 
 "sacred" or "set apart" as something inhering in the church 
 group as such but not in others; or, shall he experience all love, 
 all justice, binding men together anywhere, as the sacred? 
 Shall his initiation into common worship take him out of the 
 social consciousness of the work day and of the play day into 
 a new and separate communion; or, shall the fellowship of 
 prayer be continuous with all good fellowships, even a confirm- 
 ing of them and an inspiration within them ? Where shall the 
 child be taught to look for God ? 
 
 Underneath all these chapters on the new religious education 
 is a particular assumption. It has been vividly phrased by 
 the writer of the First Epistle of John: "This is the message 
 that ye heard from the beginning, that we should love one 
 another. . . . Love is of God; and every one that loveth is 
 begotten of God, and knoweth God. . . . But whoso hath 
 the world's goods, and beholdeth his brother in need, and 
 shutteth up his compassion from him, how doth the love of 
 God abide in him?" 
 
 If the Christian ideal were a divine autocracy, or a divine- 
 human aristocracy, then indeed it could promote itself by mak- 
 ing attractive to children a common worship that by its solemn, 
 majestic, and overawing mysteries should seem to tower above 
 and apart from the associations of the common day. If the 
 fellowship of the avowed disciples of Jesus were a particular 
 species of love, and not just plain, unreserved good will, then 
 
112 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 the child*s introduction to the church would be, indeed, an in- 
 itiation into a society of the peculiarly good, the favorites of 
 heaven. But if we grant that the fellowship of Christians is 
 rooted in a kind of divine love that desires to enfranchise 
 every man into democratic society, a love so divine that it knows 
 no favored class on the one hand, and no undivine goodness on 
 the other, then we shall induct children into common worship 
 and the communion within the church as a heightened conscious- 
 ness of what we are about in our every-day social relations. 
 The presence of God will be made manifest in united prayer, 
 not as something done in a church building, not because it is 
 uttered by a privileged person or group, or according to any 
 formula, but because the content of it brings to a focus the so- 
 cial problems of the common day, and gathers together the 
 children's powers of aspiration after the good will that is the 
 solution. Where is God ? Wherever a mature man or a little 
 child faces the problem of the mutual adjustment of two or 
 more human lives to each other, there he meets God. 
 
 Love that is so divine as to be utterly democratic makes a 
 church aspire to be, not so much a superior sort of society, as 
 an exponent of society in the large as the very dwelling place 
 of God. Ecclesiastical ambition now runs, not toward cen- 
 tralization of power in the ecclesiastical organization, but 
 toward diffusion of the light of love through the whole social 
 complex. The church itself now becomes a living exegesis of 
 the great paradox that only by losing our life do we gain life. 
 Such a church will be quick to minister to any human need 
 that is not otherwise provided for — any need, from food to fun, 
 and from athletics to art — but it will stimulate the family, 
 the school, community institutions, and the state to take upon 
 themselves every social function that they are adapted to per- 
 form. 
 
 The church of the spirit of love seeks thus to infuse itself into 
 the whole social body, not to maintain eternal separateness 
 therefrom. It does not find a competitor in any philanthropic 
 institution that efficiently organizes good will. It does not 
 depreciate as merely secular the social enthusiasm of any one 
 
THE CURRICULUM 113 
 
 who loves men as men, for God so loves them. It does not 
 grow apprehensive lest the social movement should substitute 
 the sacredness of humanity for the sacredness of worship. It 
 is apprehensive, rather, lest men may not hold life sacred 
 enough, may not love deeply enough to satisfy divine justice, 
 may not make the happy discovery of themselves as work- 
 fellows of the great Lover who is in all love, may never know 
 that love itself is worship. 
 
 The position of the church in a socialized curriculum is that 
 of a present fellowship that runs through all the developins^ 
 fellowships, inspiring them to fulfil themselves, and urging them 
 on toward the deep love of men that is also the conscious wor- 
 ship of God. 
 
 The place of the Bible in the curriculum. I have said, in 
 substance, that the theory of the curriculum is to be based 
 squarely upon the idea of incarnation — that God makes him- > 
 self known to us in concrete human life; that we obey him and 
 commune with him in any and every brotherly attitude that 
 we take toward any of his children, and that this experience 
 of God does not occur merely once or twice in history, but con- 
 tinuously. The realization of God on the part of the prophets 
 and of Jesus is transmitted to us primarily in the human lives 
 that have already come under its influence. We are linked 
 with God in ancient history by nothing less than God himself 
 within the intervening generations. Life is continuous. The 
 generations are not separated from one another like the banks 
 of a stream over which a bridge must be built. No non-living 
 thing could communicate the divine life to us, but only this 
 life itself. The consequence for religious education is that j 
 it consists primarily in the awakening of religious experience 
 in children through their contacts with persons who already 
 have such experience. The Bible then takes its place as a'"^ 
 means that mightily assists in promoting, illuminating, and 
 confirming these contacts, and in extending the Christian fel- ^ 
 lowship backward to Jesus and the prophets, and forward 
 toward the fulfilling of the prophetic ideals. 
 
 From of old it has been a custom among Christians to go 
 
114 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 to the Bible for specific help for specific needs. Does the 
 shadow of death menace us? We turn to the Twenty-third 
 Psalm or to the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians. Do 
 the uncertainties of life's struggle tempt us to compromise 
 with evil? The sixth of Matthew comes to our aid. Does 
 our prayer life require refreshing? We restudy the Lord's 
 Prayer. Do we desire to think straight on the social question ? 
 We ponder the profoundly simple words of Jesus and of the 
 prophets concerning justice and brotherly love. In short, 
 we take our start from needs involved in our present situation, 
 and we then select from the multitudinous wealth of the Scrip- 
 tures the part that gives us the greatest help. 
 
 We shall discover the true place of the Bible in the curricu- 
 lum by applying to childhood the same principle of using the 
 Scriptures in the interest of present living. If the curriculum 
 is fundamentally a course in Christian living, the Bible will be 
 used at each turn of the child's experience in such a way as 
 to help him with the particular problem that is then upper- 
 most. We as teachers shall then select for the child just 
 as we select for ourselves, leaving unconsidered for the time 
 anything in the Bible that does not feed the pupil's present need. 
 The result will be that the progressive social experience of the 
 child will be reflected in the successive passages that are chosen, 
 and if need be repeated from time to time. That is, we shall 
 have a truly graded scheme of biblical lessons. It will begin 
 with stories topically arranged, but as the pupil's outlook 
 grows, it will deal with whole periods, whole books, and finally 
 the whole movement of the religious consciousness that the 
 Bible reflects. 
 
 On precisely the same principle so-called extra-biblical 
 material will be used as it is needed. When I as an adult Chris- 
 tian meet the problem of how large my missionary contribution 
 shall be, I seek information concerning the missions of to-day. 
 When I want to know what my duty is with respect to the 
 liquor traffic, I study its baleful effects .and also the methods 
 of fighting it. When the preacher asks me to support a pro- 
 posed child-labor law, I want him to give me the facts with 
 
THE CURRICULUM 115 
 
 regard to children in industry and witli regard to the laws on 
 the subject. It' loyalty to the church is in questii)n, T nuist know 
 something of the history of the church, something of its actual 
 position in present society, and something concerning the more 
 eifective forms of church life. This is the way that we adults 
 study to be Christian. The way for children is not ditVerent in 
 principle but only in the application. Extra-biblical material 
 for study is just as necessary for them as for us because their 
 problems, like our own, have to do with enterprises and adjust- 
 ments concerning which the Bible gives no whit of information 
 — missions in lands unknown in ancient times; philanthropic en- 
 terprises under conditions and by methods not so much as con- 
 ceived of by any biblical writer; social adjustments in the 
 home, on the playground, at school, in the choice of an occu- 
 pation, in the conduct of oner's occupation, in the use of the bal- 
 lot, which must be studied directly if they are to be understood 
 at all. 
 
 Such extra-biblical factors in the problems of Christian living 
 are bound to have a large place in the socialized curriculum. 
 But they will not supplant the Hible, or derogate from its unique- 
 ness as an instrument for social education. For the Bible 
 contains a body of social literature of unique power for the stim- 
 ulation and criticism of social motives and ideals. It is in 
 and through the use of the Bible that we come into fellowship 
 with tlie greatest of our social leaders, meeting God in them. 
 No mystical introduction to the Christ who dwells in the heart 
 of every believer can be substituted for fellowship with the 
 historical Jesus and with the great Old Testament charactei*s 
 who influenced In's own social education. The fellowship of a 
 common social purpose is, indeed, the foundation of Chris- 
 tian education, and this foundation is laid in the pupil's present 
 acquaintance with persons in whom God's presence shines out 
 as love. But this fellowship, this social experience, can be I 
 extended by imagination. It is thus extended through memory, j^ 
 for how often does one become better acquainted with the real 
 character of a loved one by separation from him. Similarly, 
 imagination extends our fellowship to persons whom we have 
 
116 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 never seen, whether they are separated from us by oceans or 
 by centuries. "Whom, not having seen, we love." 
 
 The educative power of such imaginative association depends 
 partly upon the law of suggestion. Merely associating with 
 persons of positive goodness tends to habituate us to the ex- 
 pectation of goodness in ourselves. Likewise emotional re- 
 actions against imagined badness can have a part in forming 
 habitual attitudes. But this is only atmosphere or background 
 for something far more specific, namely, the use of imagined 
 persons, events, and situations in the analysis of present issues 
 and of universal laws of living. The uniqueness of the Bible 
 as a source of material for social education lies, in large measure, 
 in the sharpness with which it presents issues without abstract- 
 ing them from persons and events. Here is the truth of life 
 presented in the form of life, a form so characteristically drawn 
 that he who runs perceives the ethical meaning. There are 
 many biblical tales that one can hardly read or listen to in a 
 naive manner without, in the very act, criticising one's own 
 conduct. There are aphorisms and formulae without number 
 that become tools for mastering our own experience. 
 
 Nevertheless, the history of religious education shows that 
 even this magnificent body of concrete truth can be so taught 
 as to seem far away and unrelated to us. We must therefore 
 assume, on this ground also, the necessity of the living teacher, 
 and of art in teaching. Thus the literary material of the curric- 
 ulum finally becomes, not something per se, but ideas actually 
 performing their function. Material and method become in- 
 dissolubly one. 
 
PART III 
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL BACKGROUND OF A 
 SOCIALIZED RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 
 
CHAPTER X 
 THE SOCIAL NATURE OF MAN 
 
 The problem of Part III. We come now to the nature 
 of the human material that religious education undertakes to 
 modify. What, for the purpose of the present discussion, is 
 a child? That is, what is there in children that justifies any 
 expectation that they will make a favorable response to the 
 social principles of the Christian religion? Does child nature 
 include any obstacle to such response? What is child religion 
 as compared with the religion of adults? Are there any laws 
 of growth that condition a child's religious experience? Wliat 
 sorts of situation, controllable by the educator, are most con- 
 ducive to religious growth ? And what is the process whereby 
 a social purpose grows mature ? 
 
 These questions are different from the ones that text-books 
 for Sunday-school teachers ordinarily undertake to answer. 
 Child study for teachers of religion abounds in discussions of 
 children's imitativeness, their imagination, their memory, 
 their activity and changeability, their play, their constructive- 
 ness; all of which is important, but little of which touches 
 upon the religious capacities of childhood. It fails to touch 
 upon these capacities because it concerns the general form of 
 children's reactions rather than interests and motives. As a 
 consequence, a teacher who understands all these formal char- 
 acteristics of children, and guides the teaching process in the 
 light of them, may nevertheless appeal to either social or in- 
 dividualistic motives, and therefore may start the child either 
 well or ill. Therefore, with our eyes upon the content of the 
 Christian purpose, the democracy of God, we must go on to 
 ask what capacities children have for being interested in any 
 such thing, or for responding to any part of such an ideal. 
 
 119 
 
120 HUMAN NATURE 
 
 Some of these questions have already been touched upon 
 In our sketch of the new reHglous education, particularly in 
 Chapters VII, VIII, and IX. The general conception of a 
 child's religious progress there presented is that of the con- 
 tinuous achievement of intelligent good will in his growing social 
 relationships, and the enlargement of these relationships them- 
 selves in the church and in its worship. We assumed that 
 children respond to social incentives, and that worship of a 
 Father who loves us can be a vital experience in childhood as 
 truly, though not necessarily In the same degree or form, as 
 in adulthood. 
 
 These assumptions are not violent ones. Perhaps they 
 do not need defense, but they do need further analysis in the 
 interest of specific control of particular sorts of reaction. Rel- 
 atively simple as a child's interests and motives are, they are 
 nevertheless sufficiently complicated to make the understand- 
 ing of children, and skill in teaching (as distinguished from 
 knack) something of an achievement. We shall presently see 
 some evidence of the ease with which we misinterpret children, 
 and it will grow increasingly clear that the misplacing of a mo- 
 tive in teaching is a most serious matter. 
 
 What is meant by " the psychological background of a social- 
 ized religious education," then, is this: The social and the anti- 
 social impulses of a child, and particularly how social instincts 
 can grow into social purposes of ideal scope. This is back- 
 ground only. If middle ground and foreground also were to 
 be presented, practically the whole of educational psychology 
 would have to be reviewed. For the teaching of religion, as 
 of anything else, involves such matters as sense-perception, 
 imagination, memory, habit, attention and interest, judgment 
 and inference, the laws of transfer and the laws of fatigue. 
 For topics like these the reader is referred to the general works 
 on educational psychology. 
 
 Instinct-factors in the conduct of one human being toward 
 another. By Instinct is meant, in this discussion, any readi- 
 ness to act in a specific way in a particular sort of situation with- 
 out having learned to do so, or (as it is often put) the first time 
 
HUMAN NATURE 121 
 
 that a situation of the sort is presented. This definition, it 
 will be noted, refers to specific kinds of action rather than to 
 broad tendencies in either the race or the individual. There 
 are such broad tendencies. The evolution of the race exhibits 
 movement toward refinement in various directions, and toward 
 the organization of conduct into social institutions of increas- 
 ing scope. Similarly, growth of an individual mind consists, 
 in large measure, in the achievement of organized self-conscious- 
 ness and self-control. These tendencies are of course to be 
 included in the concept of man's social nature. They will 
 have our attention in subsequent sections. But first it is im- 
 portant, for the purpose of effective control through teaching, 
 to see that human nature is not merely a few general tendencies 
 that are to be promoted or resisted by appealing to general 
 motives, but also a vast complex of readinesses to act in this 
 or that specific way under specific conditions. What the 
 teacher has to do is to secure particular social reactions and to 
 prevent particular antisocial ones, to the end that social habits 
 and social thinking may grow with the pupil's increasing con- 
 tacts with his fellows. The effectively good will is more than 
 a benevolent sentiment toward mankind in general; it is also 
 a will trained to meet particular human situations. 
 
 In the following summary of instinct factors in social and 
 anti-social conduct I shall follow chiefly Thorndike, who has 
 carried the analysis of the instincts farther than any other 
 psychologist, but I shall subsequently make use also of certain 
 analyses by McDougall. The list summarizes factors only, 
 treating each one in its simplicity and in isolation, and without 
 reference at this point to the integral life of individual self- 
 control or of social organization. We are to notice, as it were, 
 certain bones of the human skeleton, rather than the living 
 body performing its functions.^ 
 
 » Even if limitations of space permitted me to describe in detail the situa- 
 tion that evokes each sort of response, and the muscular and physiological 
 features of each response, I could do Uttle more than reproduce the sub- 
 stance of Thorndike's descriptions. The reader is advised by all means to 
 read them for himself. See E. L. Thorndike, The Original Nature of Man 
 (which is vol. I of his three-volume Educational Psychology). New York, 1913, 
 pp. 52 /. ; 68-122. 
 
122 HUMAN NATURE 
 
 (1) Simple gregariousness, or pleasure in the mere presence 
 of other members of the species, and discomfort in their absence. 
 
 (2) Special interest in what is being done by human beings, as 
 distinguished from all other objects in the environment. 
 
 (3) Wanting to be noticed by other human beings. 
 
 (4) Craving for approval from other human beings, and discomfort 
 from their disapproval, whether the grounds of it be ethical or not. 
 
 (5) Approval or admiration not only for those who are useful 
 to u^, but also for those who exhibit strength, daring, or beauty ; and 
 disapproval, scorn, or disgust for persons of the opposite sorts, even 
 though they have not injured us. This instinct is primarily directed 
 toward qualities that are important for savage society, but the 
 sphere of its application grows with the growing standards of 
 society. Thus it is that moral strength (what is ''moral" being 
 determined by the then existing standard) is an object of instinc- 
 tive admiration. 
 
 (6) Effort to master others, particularly weaker animuls and hu- 
 man beings, and to subdue them if they resist; but also readiness to 
 submit to the strong or self-assertive individual. Thorndike classes 
 instinctive display or showing off as a partial manifestation of 
 the instinct of mastery, and shyness as a partial manifestation of 
 the instinct of submission. Both are prominent in courtship, 
 but they play a part also in much other conduct. 
 
 (7) Rivalry (attempting to get something for oneself rather 
 than let another get it), greed (getting for oneself regardless both 
 of the need of others and of oneself), and jealousy (annoyance 
 with, and perhaps attack upon, another who receives attention 
 or benefits that one desires for oneself). < 
 
 (8) Hunting. Though primarily related to the securing of 
 food, the hunting instinct does not stop here, but goes on to kill- 
 ing for sport, mastering and tormenting animals, bullying weaker 
 human beings, callous pursuit of persons whom we dislike, and 
 some forms of warfare. 
 
 (9) Anger and pugnacity. The primary instinctive response 
 to situations like being physically restrained, thwarted, or attacked 
 is (unless submission intervenes) struggling, or screaming, or 
 kicking, or striking back, or counter-attack, commonly with more 
 or less of the emotional commotion called anger. Secondarily, 
 pugnacity applies to any kind of thwarting, as in argument, and 
 it becomes pleasiu'e in combat as such, whether with weapons or 
 in sport, whether with muscles or with wits. 
 
HUMAN NATURE 123 
 
 (10) Sex attraction. The social significance of the sex instinct 
 far outruns the mere perpetuation of the species. "It is true 
 that sex attraction as such does not seem to include regard for 
 another's interests; nothing can be more ruthless than the sex 
 instinct, in some of its manifestations, at least. Yet it does not 
 generally exist 'in and by itself in the human species. The fixa- 
 tion of attention upon another, the vivid realization of his presence 
 as chis particular individual, which is characteristic of sex attrac- 
 t/on, has an unportant consequence. We individualize another 
 by Einfuhlung — that is, by imaginative putting of oneself in 
 another's place — so that we reciprocally feel one another's satis- 
 factions and discomforts. Now, sex attraction, as well as pa- 
 rental instinct, strongly individualizes its object. Therefore we 
 may assume that sex makes a direct contribution to the apprecia- 
 tion of benevolence and justice. Something very like the parental 
 attitude also appears between lovers — ^the attitude of protection, 
 intense response to every sign of pain, cuddling." ^ It is a matter 
 of great social import, moreover, that sex attraction influences 
 conduct toward persons with whom sexual union is out of the ques- 
 tion, as in the attitudes of the two sexes toward each other in the 
 family, in social gatherings and diversions, in friendships, and in 
 the many respects in wliich we treat the two sexes differently. 
 The emotional accompaniments of the adolescent sex awakening 
 affect even the attitudes of males toward males and of females 
 toward females; yes, the fresh aesthetic, idealizing, and compan- 
 ionship-seeking state of mind often modifies one's whole social 
 attitude, and even one's attitude toward nature. 
 
 (11) Parental regard. It is most obvious and most tender in 
 mothers, being related in origin to sensations connected with 
 suckling and with other close and frequent physical contacts. 
 But it is instinctive in both men and women. Undoubtedly the 
 attachment of the father for the mother has much to do with the 
 attention that he gives to their children, and thus with the activity 
 of paternal affection. Possibly self-giving maternal affection is 
 the evolutionary link that has united the father with the child, 
 and thus given rise to the permanent monogamous family. Yet 
 the father's regard for his children is, conversely, an added bond 
 between him and their mother. In any case, whatever was first 
 in origin, the spontaneous readiness of both parents to feed, pro- 
 
 1 G. A. Coe, The Psychology of Religion, Chicago, 1916, pp. 163 /. (note). 
 
124 HUMAN NATURE 
 
 tect, and succor their offspring through the extraordinarily long 
 human infancy is a prime psychological foundation of what is 
 finest, and most difficult, in the larger social integrations of men. 
 Its relation to the larger society grows out of two circumstances: 
 a. In the family, which rests upon parental instinct, and spe- 
 cifically through the intimate domestic manifestations of this in- 
 stinct, children receive social training that is in some measure 
 transferred to then* life in the larger society, h. The parental 
 instinct is not limited to parents, nor are small children the only 
 objects that stimulate it. This matter is so involved and its 
 social bearings are so important that detailed attention will be 
 given to It In a subsequent section. 
 
 (12) The kind of imitativeness that produces crowd action. 
 
 The unique social significance of the parental instinct. 
 
 Two groups of facts will indicate how broad and deep is the 
 influence of this instinct in the evolution of society, particularly 
 of democratic society. 
 
 (1) Parental attitudes arise spontaneously long before physi- 
 ological capacity for parenthood arrives; they live on through 
 life, even though one never has children of one's own, and they 
 attach themselves not only to children, but to adults as well. Noth- 
 ing less than parental are the relations that small children, 
 boys as well as girls, assume with dolls, animal pets, smaller 
 children, and toys. This is not mere imitation of older per- 
 sons, for the activities are clearly different from those of adults 
 in many respects, and the emotional fervor and tenacity are 
 too obviously original with the child. There is no escaping 
 the conclusion that this is actual parental instinct. Its instinc- 
 tive character is proved by: (1) Its universality. (2) The 
 possibility of identifying its primary objects as a class, namely, 
 smaller things thought of as living, especially those that are 
 helpless, lonely, or sufTerlng. (3) The specific nature of its 
 motor discharges, such as taking into one's arms, keeping near 
 one (as at night), providing food (real or imaginary) and other 
 objects to meet particular assumed needs, patting, stroking, 
 laying the cheek against. (4) A surprising confirmation of 
 this theory that has been brought to my attention by one of 
 
HUMAN NATURE 125 
 
 my students. The evidence consists of photographs of two 
 half-grown bluebirds, one of which is in the act of feeding a 
 worm to the other. One of the pictures shows the two facing 
 each other, one with the worm, the other with open mouth; 
 the other picture shows the bill of the first bird well down the 
 throat of the other. Here the instinct to swallow whenever 
 a worm is in the mouth is inhibited exactly as it is when a 
 mother bird has her first brood; it is inhibited, obviously, by 
 another instinct. 
 
 That this instinct lives on through life, especially if it re- 
 ceives frequent indulgence either in affectionate acts toward 
 one's own offspring or toward other objects, hardly needs argu- 
 ment. The parental petting of animals does not cease with 
 childhood; with the childless it is often a substitute for literal 
 parenthood. A baby, too — anybody's baby, white, yellow, or 
 black — is an object of peculiar interest. I have seen the tired 
 faces of a whole group of men and women in a New York sub- 
 way car relax and mellow as their eyes all sought the face of a 
 baby playing in its mother's lap. Austere men, hard men, boys 
 who are ready to bully those only a little younger than them- 
 selves, all are gentle, all take the attitude of protection toward 
 very small children.^ The teaching profession, education as a 
 whole, is permeated by a truly parental interest in the young. 
 
 When parents reach the weakness of old age, then the chil- 
 dren, in their turn, assume the parental attitude toward those 
 who bore them. A gentleman who was showing exquisite 
 tenderness toward an aged parent remarked: "I have had no 
 children of my own, you know." In general, too, does not 
 reverence for gray hairs contain this instinct as one of its con- 
 stituents? And why is it that everybody is ready to help a 
 blind man find his way upon the street? No doubt the im- 
 pulses that underlie our relations to our fellows are complex, 
 and to some extent contradictory. Some of them become 
 dominant, others are smothered, or contradictory impulses 
 
 1 Without doubt males would be more demonstrative in this direction but 
 for a social tradition of sex inequality, and but for that other balefUl tradi- 
 tion, that manliness is demonstrated by fishting rather than by tenderness. 
 These, too, rest back upon instinct, of covirse. 
 
126 HUMAN NATURE 
 
 alternate. But any one who has eyes can see continually com- 
 ing to the surface, in fragmentary ways at least, spontaneous 
 helpfulness of the parental type. 
 
 (2) The parental instinct is the chief source ^ probably the 
 exclusive source, of tender regard for individuals as such, that is, 
 taking another's happiness or woe as one's very own. Thorn- 
 dike is, on the whole, inclined to regard the pitying response 
 to signs of weakness, fright, and pain, as an instance of, or 
 derivative from, "motherly behavior."^ Whatever be the 
 fact in this matter, pity is only one aspect of mothering, and 
 it is only one aspect of regard for individuals as such. The 
 major manifestation of this regard is demand for justice for 
 all men simply as men, and readiness to suffer actively with 
 them in the struggle to obtain it. There is something in us 
 that makes us individualize our fellows, think of them one by 
 one apart from possessions, apart from their age and social 
 status, apart even from their individual defects, and believe in 
 them. The one point at which we can indisputably discern an 
 instinctive tendency to do this is the relation of parents to 
 their children. We follow the line of probability, then, when 
 we look upon the sacrifice of one's own welfare that others 
 may have their rights (welfare, that is, as measured by any less 
 social standard) as being, on the large human scale, the same 
 thing as a parent's insistence that each of his children shall 
 have life, and liberty, and happiness. 
 
 Our problem here, it will be perceived, concerns the instinc- 
 tive basis of the love of mankind that is required by the second 
 of the two Great Commandments. We call it brotherly love, 
 and speak of its goal as the brotherhood of man. But what is 
 brotherly love, even within the limits of the family? Is the 
 bond between brothers and sisters a specific fraternal instinct? 
 The existence of such an instinct is by no means proved by the 
 obvious naturalness of the affection. Consider the closeness of 
 the association between brothers and sisters, then consider the 
 long period through which it lasts, and finally ask what, under 
 these conditions, is to be expected from the instincts numbered 
 
 » Pp. 102 /, 
 
HUMAN NATURE 127 
 
 1 to 6 in our list. From these alone, under the laws of habit 
 formation, we should expect a rather close group life which is 
 likely to make a lifelong distinction between one's own brothers 
 and sisters and other persons. What we have to account for 
 in addition is positive outgoing affection, which far transcends 
 the habitual accommodations to one another that grow out of 
 the instincts just referred to. That is, we have to account for 
 affection like that of parent for child. What if fraternal affec- 
 tion, in its most intimate phase, is the exercise of parental in- 
 stinct? We cannot be mistaken in seeing this instinct in cer- 
 tain attitudes of older children toward brothers and sisters who 
 are much younger. We are not likely to err when we interpret 
 in the same way all the rest of the sympathetic fraternal loyalty 
 that springs up in domestic intimacies. Finally, the parents' 
 own instinctive attitudes act as a constant suggestion to the 
 children to take the same attitudes toward one another. The 
 sum of the matter is that the fraternal relation in the family 
 is a highly ^jomplex thing, and that it gets its quality of justice 
 or feelingly taking the brother's interests as one's own, from 
 the factor of parental instinct. 
 
 From what quality of original nature comes the affectionate 
 response of a child to a parent's affection? Love begets love, 
 no doubt, but how ? If we had to rely upon antecedent proba- 
 bilities we should guess that there is a filial instinct that answers 
 to the parental. But when we analyze an infant's earliest 
 reactions to maternal care, we discover that they fall chiefly 
 under the first six heads of our list together with the twelfth. 
 What remains to be accounted for is filial affection or love in 
 the strict sense already defined in the last two paragraphs. 
 But this is the same sort of attitude that distinguishes parental 
 affection. What, then, if filial affection, like the corresponding 
 phase of fraternal affection, is an early manifestation of parental 
 instinct? What but this is the attitude of protection and of 
 succor toward a father or a mother who is weary and heavy 
 laden, sick, in sorrow, injured by others, or suffering reverses 
 and disappointments? Family intimacies provide precisely 
 the opportunity, scarcely existent elsewhere, for small children 
 
128 HUMAN NATURE • 
 
 to play the parent to mature persons. Small children pat and 
 stroke a parent's face or hand, and when is a little one as happy 
 as when he can play parent to the whole family? A boy of 
 about four years, when his mother was nursing him through 
 the croup, said : " Show me just what you do for me, mother, 
 so that when I have little boys and girls with croup, I will 
 know what to do for them." About six weeks later, when his 
 mother had a headache, he assumed the attitude of physician 
 and parent to her just as he had done to his own prospective 
 children. Nothing seems to evoke filial affection as surely as 
 being permitted to help father and mother. Doing things for 
 a child does not touch his heart half as much as permittiu^g him 
 to do things for you I^ The conclusion is that our love for our 
 fathers and mothers is of the same instinctive quality as their 
 love for us. We can be good sons and daughters by letting 
 free in ourselves the very thing that makes a good parent. 
 
 A side-light upon this question may be discerned in the com- 
 mon chivalric devotion of sons to their mothers, to which noth- 
 ing in the ordinary relations of sons to fathers corresponds. 
 This devotion probably has one of its roots in some obscure 
 response to sex differences, but another part of the explanation, 
 without doubt, is that the more frequent manifestation of weak- 
 ness or of distress by the mother has called out, and by habit 
 confirmed, the son's parental instinct. 
 
 It is not less true that love for mankind as such, to the ex- 
 tent that it is anywhere realized, is an exercise of parental 
 instinct. We see this clearly in child-welfare movements. 
 The parent mind in us is what yearns over sick babies. This 
 it is that insists, even at great expense to ourselves, upon giving 
 to the next generation, through education, a better and larger 
 life than we have had. It is the same impulse that hastens to 
 the relief of sufferers from famine, flood, and war, and that 
 takes pure joy in seeing others well fed and happy. To this, 
 in the end, must we appeal for the community spirit that puts 
 sanitation, education, civic beauty, and diffused happiness 
 upon the plane of simple humanity, that is above all consid- 
 i Cf. Patterson Du Bois, Beckonings from Little Hands (1900). 
 
HUMAN NATURE 129 
 
 erations of private advantage, either immediate or ultimate. 
 What makes us struggle for democracy, too, is that, putting 
 ourselves imaginatively in the place of the narrowed, thwarted, 
 stunted lives about us, we feel toward them as we would if they 
 were our own children. What we democrats demand, in fact, 
 is that all men everywhere should have opportunity to grow up. 
 
 Because all men are potentially parent-minded, the world is 
 capable of being won to democracy. We can make the sacri- 
 fices that this will require — sacrifices of our substance, of our 
 labor, and of our aristocratic and plutocratic privileges — for 
 the same reason that we can do it for our natural offspring. 
 
 Social education requires that some instincts be suj)-^_ 
 pressed. When the term instinct is used for broad, general 
 qualities of human nature rather than for readiness to act in 
 a specific way in a specific situation, it is possible to claim that 
 no instinct should be suppressed. If, for example, we classify 
 all spontaneous getting under an "acquisitive" instinct, we 
 shall hold that it has some permanent value. But when we 
 come to details we discover that some acquisition is just a grab- 
 bing that increases in intensity if another person is seen to get 
 or to be likely to get any part of the desired objects. Grabbing 
 away from others goes on, too, until one accumulates more than 
 one can use. In such rivalry and greed one's relation to per- 
 sons is exactly contrary to parental instinct, which delights in 
 seeing another feed himself. W^hat must be done with rivalry 
 and greed in the interest of society is to suppress them if we 
 can. Similarly, scorn for those who are weak, physically de- 
 fective, or lacking in good looks, seems to serve no present social 
 ends, but to hinder them only. -- 
 
 Likewise, instinctive mastery and submission seem, though 
 not quite as certainly, to be at least needless, and possibly 
 without exception a hinderance to the growth of society toward 
 democracy. What democracy requires is co-operation. Lead- 
 ership is of course necessary, but leadership that is itself co- 
 operation, a fulfilling of the w ill of the led, not mastery of them. 
 Curbing of individual will also is required, but this again is, 
 ideally, not submission to the arbitrary will of another, but 
 
130 HUMAN NATURE 
 
 one's contribution to a common will from which arbitrariness 
 has been eliminated by maldng it truly a common will. These 
 remarks apply to sex relations as well as to others. Instinctive 
 mastery by the male, and instinctive submission by the fe- 
 male, are a social evil because of their effect upon the character 
 of both the man and the woman, and because of the support 
 that they lend to social inequalities beyond the conjugal rela- 
 tion. Conjugal affection must be democratized along with the 
 other social relations. 
 
 The instincts of hunting, anger, and pugnacity, in many 
 instances, though scarcely in all, have an antisocial tendency. 
 The tormenting of animals, or the killing of them for other 
 purposes than food and protection, the hunting down of men in 
 partisanships, persecutions, and wars, and all the purely 
 destructive forms of anger and pugnacity, are obviously un- 
 social in fact and in tendency. But most persons suppose that 
 these instincts are sometimes useful socially, not for purposes 
 of destruction, but as constituents of a rationally controlled 
 good will. There can, it seems, be anger and pugnacity toward 
 evil without hating the evil-doer. But how much reflectiveness, 
 how much self-restraint are required to maintain this distinc- 
 tion in practice I We need to be cautious lest the undeniable 
 pleasure of destroying living things that we dislike be indulged 
 under the specious name of " righteous indignation," or " hatred 
 of wrong," or "standing for righteousness." When anger or 
 pugnacity separates me from any human being so that he ceases 
 to have value for me, or so that the value that I theoretically 
 attribute to him does not control my conduct toward him, social 
 ends are not promoted, they are hindered only. If I must fight 
 against something that you fight for, I must herein fight /or you, 
 for a better and happier you, yes, for a fellowship with you that 
 is yet to be. 
 
 The deep depravity of war, just as of enmities between in- 
 dividuals, lies in the implied denial that my enemy is still my 
 brother, and that I am his keeper — all the more his keeper if 
 he has faults that I can help him to overcome. Herein con- 
 sists the profound difference, the impassable gulf, between war 
 
HUMAN NATURE 131 
 
 and the exercise of police power. If a policeman discovers 
 me in the act of picking your pocket, he does not dispose of my 
 case by clubbing me. No, he brings me before a court in which, 
 though I have done wrong, I still have rights which society 
 protects, the very society that I have wronged. Here, in the 
 calmness of reason, my relations to the welfare of society are 
 determined, and also, in any enlightened penal system, my re- 
 lations to my own welfare. What modern penology aims at 
 is not to separate me from my fellows, but by separating me 
 from my evil ways to unite me closer to my fellows. If, now, 
 the policeman undertakes to settle my relations to society with 
 a club, if he assumes that I am nothing as against the offended 
 will of the state, if he is not my policeman, acting for me as 
 well as my neighbors, he exemplifies the tooth-and-claw con- 
 ception that underlies war. War, which endeavors to impose 
 one national will upon another by force, must be supplanted by 
 a system of world-law, world-com'ts, and a world-police, which 
 will seek the welfare of offender and offended alike, and work 
 always toward the maintenance, and if need be the restoration, 
 of fellowship. Tliis implies educational measures for suppress- 
 ing our socially destructive instincts, for stopping war at its 
 source in our own minds. ^ 
 
 The socially constructive instincts, all of them, require 
 training. Even the best natural impulses, taken by themselves, 
 are uneconomical; they are not sufficiently fine for the work 
 that has to be done. Maternal affection prompts mothers to 
 give to infants coffee and beer as well as milk; and until this 
 
 1 See H. R. Marshall, War and the Ideal of Peace. A Study of Those Char- 
 acteristics of Man That Result in War, and of the Means by Which They May 
 Be Controlled. New York, 1915. 
 
 (Note. — The above paragraph was written while I still believed that a 
 war between the United States and Germany might be avoided. Before I 
 conmiit the paragraph to the typesetter I have opportimity to review my 
 words in the light of tlie actuality of the dreaded conflict. It is clear that the 
 pmT)ose of our war as defined by President Wilson takes the standpoint of 
 what I have called above "the exercise of poUce power." There is, in fact, a 
 remarkable parallel between my conception of "world-law, world-courts, and 
 world-police," and the requirements of world-decency as he defines them. 
 For he calls upon us to employ force, not to impose our national will upon 
 any nation, but to secure "the riglits of nations, great and small, and the 
 privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience." 
 *'We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We 
 
132 HUMAN NATURE 
 
 instinct is trained It reacts in the same way to pure and to im- 
 pure milk. Thorndike remarks that "the irrational impulse 
 to get the sick to eat seems to prevail the world over."^ These 
 examples would of themselves be convincing. The full pro- 
 portions of the task of positive social training should, however, 
 be faced. This can be done by going carefully through our list 
 of instincts, noting how, from beginning to end, they consti- 
 tute the basis of possible social conduct, not at one level only but 
 at any one of many levels. This is most often recognized in 
 respect to sex attraction, which underlies conduct that ranges 
 all the way from brutality to saintliness. The same sort of 
 analysis will show that, in the sphere of the gregarious instinct 
 also we may habituate ourselves to pleasure in one type of 
 society as against another. We have an instinctive interest in 
 what other human beings are doing; yes, but we may acquire 
 a habit of being more interested in important than in unim- 
 portant doings. Here is the possibility of growing out of gossip 
 into conversation! We want to be noticed by others; yes, 
 but we may learn to take more pleasure in being noticed by one 
 sort of persons than another. We instinctively like to be 
 approved, but by training we can make ourselves unresponsive 
 to praise and blame from certain quarters, and we can concen- 
 trate our claims to approval upon that in us which we can our- 
 selves approve. We spontaneously admire beauty, but upon 
 our training it depends whether or not we notice beauty of 
 spirit. We instinctively go with the crowd, but we can form a 
 discriminating taste with respect to crowds, so that some of 
 
 seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices 
 we shall freely make." We are "seeking nothing for ourselves but what we 
 shall wish to share with all free peoples." We are to work toward "the 
 ultimate peace of the world . ' ' We are to make the world ' ' safe for democracy ' ' 
 by ' ' setting up amongst the reaUy free and self-governed peoples of the world 
 such a concert of purpose and of action as wiU henceforth insure the observ- 
 ance of " . . . "peace and justice in the Ufe of the world as against selfish and 
 autocratic power." "We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be 
 insisted that the same standards of conduct and of responsibiUty for wrong 
 done shall be observed among nations and their governments that are ob- 
 served among the individual citizens of civiUzed states." 
 
 The implication of all this is that we have before us the task of establishing 
 a genuine world-police power.] 
 
 1 P. 193. 
 
HUMAN NATURE 133 
 
 them we do not enjoy. In short, there is not a single point at 
 which our instincts are sufficient of themselves to provide for 
 social progress. Blind impulse makes happy hits, of course, 
 as it makes unhappy ones. What we have to do is to raise 
 above chance the proportion of hits and misses. An inevitable 
 pnrt of our ethical calling is to bestow sight upon even the best 
 of our instinctive qualities. 
 
 Popular confusion between what is instinctive and what 
 is acquired. How often do we hear it said of one child that 
 he is "naturally" amiable, and of another that he is "naturally" 
 self-willed, the implication of "naturally" being that the quality 
 in question is a matter of original endowment, and therefore 
 unchangeable. No doubt the amiability and the self-will are 
 both natural. But the popular mind does not realize that 
 habit-formation (which is as spontaneous, as "natural" as 
 anything else), intertwining with instinct, fixes some of the 
 early instinctive responses so that they w^ill be repeated there- 
 after to the exclusion of other responses that are equally possible 
 at the beginning. One's instinctive endowment is not a walled 
 lane that offers no alternatives to one's feet, but an open trail, 
 with many forks and branches, some leading into life's swamps 
 and quagmires, some onto the meadows of conventional good- 
 ness, some upward to the bright peaks and the dark valleys of 
 social idealism. 
 
 Children's dispositions are complexes of what is native and 
 what is acquired. The acquired part is the habits whereby 
 certain impulses, specialized by experience, are given a per- 
 manent and specific direction, while other native impulses, 
 unused or repressed, remain in the background, or decrease 
 toward complete atrophy. Favorable or unfavorable nervous 
 conditions (whether they are determined by health and disease, 
 or by such hygienic matters as proper and improper feeding) 
 are one fundamental factor. When nerves are irritated, and 
 vitality is depressed, the range of possible happiness is limited, 
 and the particular narrow range of satisfactions tends to be- 
 come permanent in its narrowness. If peevishness, obstinacy, 
 or screaming is what brings the child his satisfactions, of course 
 
134 HUMAN NATURE 
 
 it becomes a habit. It is then called the child's disposition, 
 and is attributed to the stepmotherliness of nature ! On the 
 other hand, granted favorable nervous conditions, jplus con- 
 stant and abundant opportunity for mutual pleasures (the child 
 with his parents and with other children), plus steady, unrelaxing 
 arrangements whereby individualistic reactions are prevented 
 from bringing pleasure — granted these things, any child will 
 acquire an amiable disposition. Unthinking persons will attrib- 
 ute it to some mystery of original nature, whereas, as settled 
 disposition it is a result of habit formation, a product of social 
 training, whether intended or unintended. 
 
 The superinstinctive factors of our social nature. The 
 inventory of man's original social capacities includes, as was 
 noted a little way back, certain general tendencies toward the 
 organization of a self, and toward the increasing integration of 
 men in social institutions. The special instinct-factors that 
 have just occupied our attention are not a mere collection of 
 zoological specimens — odd forms, odd voices, odd ways — each 
 living its own life without regard to others. Our instincts are 
 more like the multiplicity of a city. 
 
 When we look from the upper stories of a tall office-building 
 far down into streets thronged with incessantly moving men, 
 our first impression is likely to be that of the utter irrationality 
 of what we behold. It seems to be a meaningless coming and 
 going, like dust particles carried in air currents hither and 
 thither. Yet what we see is not a chaos of impulsive acts, but 
 acts organized into great systems — systems for feeding and 
 clothing the people, for teaching the children, for distributing 
 news, for healing the sick, for protecting the public health, 
 for restraining those who lack self-restraint. Moreover, if we 
 look into each of these moving particles of humanity, we find 
 its own diverse elements at least partly organized, each man be- 
 ing an individual self, not walking at random, but going some- 
 whither that he desires and approves. There is not a man 
 in the throng who has not to some extent taken notice of his 
 instinctive impulses ; there is not a man who is not holding some 
 of these impulses in leash. 
 
HUMAN NATURE 135 
 
 To become individual selves is a part of our original nature. 
 It is a part of our original nature to form societies not merely 
 on the basis of instincts that flow in the same direction but 
 also on the basis of recognized selfhood. Now, these two, the 
 formation of a definite self and the formation of societies, are 
 not in reality separate processes, nor are the results separate; 
 rather, we have here two phases of a single process, two phases 
 of a single achievement. For the achievement of a self is possi- 
 ble only in and through recognition of other selves, and what is 
 distinctively human in society is precisely the organization of 
 regard for individual selves as finalities. 
 
 Movement, effort toward this achievement, is natural to 
 man — as natural as fleeing from a lion or pursuing a deer. Here 
 is something in human nature that is superinstinctive, some- 
 thing that reflects upon, regulates, and uses instinct, and this 
 something is in the profoundest possible sense both individual 
 and social.^ 
 
 The notion that human nature does not change. What 
 has now been said as to the variability of habit within the scope 
 of the instincts, and with respect to the naturalness of the 
 correlative growth of self and society, has an important bear- 
 ing upon that ogre's castle of social pessimism: "Your ideals 
 won't work as long as human nature remains what it is." For 
 now we can answer: "What do you mean by human nature?" 
 The problem is by no means ended when we have recognized 
 the fact that the instincts are hereditary, permanent, and fun- 
 damental to character. We must bear in mind, in addition, 
 first, that no instinct is strictly univocal, but that every one has 
 indefinitely many possible modes of expression that vary through 
 a large scale; second, that habit forming is also human nature, 
 and that it makes possible the fixing in human life, in an individ- 
 ual and through the generations by training, of either better 
 or worse instinctive ways; and, third, that to become a self- 
 criticising self, and to form self-criticising societies, are also a 
 
 1 1 content myself with this brief statement here because I touch upon 
 It in other places in the present work, and because I have discussed it in my 
 Psychology of Religion (see Index under " Social Aspects of Religion," and 
 chap. XiV). 
 
136 HUMAN NATURE 
 
 part of human nature, so that nature herself provides fori 
 taking the side of social aspiration as against what is unsocial 
 in our instincts. " As long as human nature remains what it is," 
 therefore, we may expect indefinite transformation of social, 
 life toward the highest ideals that we can conceive. The in- 
 dividual who in full health and vigor lies down under the weight 
 of ancient wrong, saying that it is just human nature, does 
 thereby make himself a critic of that nature, does thereby justify 
 the opinion that he could hate ancient wrong a little harder, and 
 that he could summon his neighbors not to surrender but to 
 keep up the fight. 
 
 What if, moreover, self-conscious contemplation of our de- 
 sires should give rise to new desires ? How often, as a matter of 
 fact, something like this certainly does occur. When I was a 
 boy I thought it would be sport to shoot a meadow-lark — I 
 thought so until a dead lark lay in my hands. I can see even 
 now how its head hung limp when I lifted the beautiful body. 
 At that instant one desire died and another was born. I saw 
 myself having my desire, but defeated just because I had 
 succeeded. I advanced to a new point of view, a new standard 
 of values, a new arrangement of instinctive likes and dislikes. 
 It makes little difference whether or not the new attitude can 
 be classed under one of the instincts, for I came to myself y to a 
 new self, to an unprecedented desire. 
 
 Society attains new mass desires in similar ways. When, 
 rising above crowd action, and holding up our social habits to 
 relentless scrutiny, we say: "This is our work, the result of 
 what our community has done or neglected to do. Is this 
 what we desire?" then we cringe before our old community 
 self, or, as the case may be, we are inspired to excel ourselves. 
 In increasing instances a community survey awakens community 
 self-consciousness, and then and there men begin to support 
 one another in having desires that they simply did not have 
 before. 
 
 Social reconstruction is provided for in the nature of man. 
 This is the reason why the likes and dislikes of men change so 
 markedly between savagery and civilization. We simply could 
 
HUMAN NATURE 137 
 
 not enjoy some of the things that brought intense satisfaction 
 to our early ancestors unless in some way we could be gradually 
 trained backward. We are sunk enough, God knows, yet 
 wants are better than they were. By giving attention to what 
 we really want, and by training the impulses that we really 
 prefer, we shall develop still other wants and the ways of satis- 
 fying them.^ 
 
 1 In chap. XIII of my Psychology of Religion, I have discussed this question at 
 greater length. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 CHILDREN'S FAITH IN GOD 
 
 Children's notions of God are acquired as other notions 
 are. To the question, How do little children get their notions 
 of God? there is a simple, obvious answer: By instruction and 
 hearsay, just as ideas of angels, fairies, hobgoblins, Santa Glaus, 
 and of historical personages are acquired. This "acquiring" 
 of an idea includes, of course, a complex reaction. Language 
 has no power to transfer a thought from one mind to another, 
 but only to stimulate a mind to think. The meaning of the 
 term God, and of any affirmation about him, has to be con- 
 strued by imaginative combination of thought materials derived 
 from the child's previous experiences. Nor does the idea, 
 once started, continue "in one stay," but items from the child's 
 growing experience are read into it and out of it. 
 
 The idea of God varies, therefore, from child to child, and 
 from day to day, according to instruction or hearsay, the mean- 
 ings that words (such as father) have already acquired, the 
 characteristic experiences of the child (especially his experience 
 of persons), and his usual methods of association and of infer- 
 ence. A boy not yet four years old who had had difficulty 
 with "bad boys" in his back yard arranged there a house for 
 God, saying: "He'll keep the bad boys out; nobody else can." 
 This "house of God" was merely a large doll-house with some 
 additions of the boy's own devising. When he was four years 
 and eight months old he spontaneously made a drawing, in 
 which God and Santa Glaus, a Christmas tree, flags, home, and 
 toys, which include a locomotive engine on a railroad-track, 
 all figure. It is evident that this child, putting his own con- 
 struction upon the words of others, had built up a notion of 
 God far different from what his elders intended. On the other 
 
 138 
 
CHILDREN'S FAITH 139 
 
 hand, the direct influence of instruction seems to appear in his 
 argument with a playmate who had asserted that "If you do 
 anything in a dark room God can't see it." "Yes, he can!" 
 was the reply, " He can see you even in a dark room. He looks 
 down through the stars, and I'm not going to do anything to 
 get caught ! " 
 
 Another boy of about the same age gave the following ob- 
 jective evidence of the Christmas story that he had recently 
 heard. Of his own motion he devised for the entertainment of 
 his parents and some guests a dramatization of the Star in the 
 East. First, extinguishing other lights, he lighted a candle, 
 which was to represent the sun. Then he placed an apple for 
 the moon, and extinguished the candle in order to show that 
 night had come. Finally, announcing that he w^as God, and 
 was going to bring in the Star of Bethlehem, he marched into 
 the room, bearing some sticks crudely fastened together with 
 the apparent pm-pose of representing the conventional picture 
 of a star's rays. 
 
 As an illustration of how the child's own social experience is 
 read into his thought of God, the following case is instructive. 
 "Mamma," said a boy a little older than those just mentioned, 
 "do you know what I'm going to do the first thing when I get 
 to heaven? I'm going to run up to the Heavenly Father, and 
 give him a kiss!" Obviously this feeling-reaction to the idea 
 of a Heavenly Father is due in part to experience in a human 
 family. 
 
 Suggestion and imitation in childhood religion. Thus, 
 both the fact that children have ideas of God, and the varia- 
 tions of these ideas from our adult notions are easily accounted 
 for. That children really believe in God thus conceived is also 
 obvious enough. They believe what they are told, and in this 
 respect no difference is discernible between belief in God, in the 
 Sand Man, or in the Black Man. The influence of mere sug- 
 gestion upon children's beliefs is possibly more extensive and 
 more prolonged than we ordinarily suppose. On a certain occa- 
 sion, having told to a group of children a story of how I had seen 
 a chipmunk store food, which included a muscat grape, upon 
 
140 CHILDREN'S FAITH 
 
 the branches of a fir-tree, I remarked: "So there was a green 
 grape growing upon an evergreen tree ! " One of my listeners, 
 a girl of about eight years, came to me some days afterward 
 to inquire whether the grape really did grow upon that tree ! 
 / Just as children readily accept our instruction, so they will- 
 ingly imitate our religious acts. The evening prayer, grace 
 before meat, participation in public worship — these, under 
 favorable conditions, are well liked; they require no com- 
 pulsion. But they cannot, without further evidence, be re- 
 garded as clear signs of piety. Nevertheless, even such imita- 
 tive acts may have immediate social value, and ultimate relig- 
 ious value. In a certain family that was accustomed to have 
 brief devotions at the breakfast-table there was a girl who was 
 still too young to commit the Lord's Prayer to memory. One 
 morning, just after she had triumphantly learned to count up 
 to eight, she joined her voice with the others when the Lord^s 
 Prayer was repeated by saying loudly: "One, two, three, four, 
 five, six, seven, eight. . . . One, two, three, four, five, six, 
 seven, eight!" I would hesitate to deny that even this crude 
 participation in social worship contributed to religious growth. 
 For the social situation was a religious one, and the girl's re- 
 action, bare though it was of definite religious ideas, enriched 
 her membership in the group, and brought her mind nearer to 
 the meaning of the function then being performed. 
 
 These facts — the credulity of children's beliefs, the desultory 
 associations that cluster therein, and the imitative origin of 
 children's religious acts — go far toward accounting for the am- 
 biguous or even negative attitude that largely prevails among 
 adults with respect to the religious life of children. Besides, 
 we are just now reacting against two types of religious work 
 with them, the formal or catechetical type, and the revival or 
 conversion-experience type. If these are the only practicable 
 ways of promoting spiritual life in children, then indeed we must 
 ^ look for skepticism as to genuine spiritual life much before 
 adolescence. It is not enough to show that children accept 
 the idea of God, join in religious practices, and make an emo- 
 tional response to revivalistic suggestion. The deeper question 
 
CHILDREN'S FAITH 141 
 
 concerns a life of faith properly so called. This implies not 
 merely belief and imitation, but also emotional satisfaction, 
 and motivation of conduct without feverish excesses — in short, 
 a personal realization or experience in a natural life. Does this 
 exist in the small child ? 
 
 Is there a special religious instinct? If children — adults, 
 too, for that matter — are to have vital religious experience as 
 distinguished from doctrinal assent, imitation, and emotional 
 forcing, it must doubtless have a basis in instinct. Religious 
 educators therefore have compelling reason to inquire whether 
 there is a specifically religious instinct, that is, a universal in- 
 born readiness to respond in some specific religious manner to 
 particular, definable situations. If there is, then the work of 
 religious education consists fundamentally in creating just 
 these situations and placing children in them. On the other 
 hand, if there is no specific religious instinct, but if religious 
 response consists rather in a particular direction and organiza- 
 tion of the various instinctive capacities for social living, then 
 religious education does not have to create situations or invent 
 special stimuli, but to utilize in appropriate ways the every- 
 day human relations of the child. The alternatives may be 
 roughly suggested by asking whether religious experience is 
 apart from, or a part of our experience of one another.^ 
 
 It is not possible in this place to go farther toward answering 
 this question than merely to recite conclusions from the general 
 psychology of religion. Of the naturalness of religion there is 
 of course no question. It is not an invention; it is not an im- 
 position of some upon others; its early appearance in the race, 
 its universality, its persistence, and the way in which it is 
 interfused with all sorts of human affairs, are conclusive on this 
 point. This interfusion gives us, in fact, a clew to the sense 
 in which religion is natural. It appears historically as a living 
 out, intensely and insistently, of the interests that seem im- 
 portant, particularly the interests that gather about the life 
 
 1 If my purpose were not merely to identify the thing, but also to deflne 
 it with philosophical precision, I should of course suggest that our religious 
 experience may possibly be, not a part of our experience of one another, but a 
 whole, of which oui' human fellowships are parts or phases. 
 
142 CHILDREN'S FAITH 
 
 of men in societies, and as a tendency to organize and unify 
 these interests. It is not an aside, or a luxury, or any other 
 sort of addition to the common Hfe, but just life most deter- 
 mined to fulfil itself to the utmost. There is here no trace of 
 an instinct that functions by itself, but only of a tendency 
 within the instincts taken as a whole.^ 
 
 This general conclusion can be made more specific by reverting 
 to the analysis of man's social nature in the last chapter. What 
 is most characteristic of the religious consciousness is closely 
 related, on the one hand, to the general tendency to become 
 personal selves in a society of such selves, and on the other 
 hand to the parental instinct, which plays such a distinctive 
 part in individuating us and socializing us. Faith in God has 
 impulsive roots in desires for a sufficient and certain supply of 
 the things that men want, in the instinct that causes a man to 
 identify his own wants and welfare with those of another, and 
 in the human way of taking our ultimate values as our ultimate 
 reals. What is most significant for our present discussion is 
 that gods have been to their worshippers not only a security 
 for goods of all kinds, but particularly a security for the goods 
 that are socially sought and enjoyed, and that gods have been 
 likewise a spontaneous and last term in fellowship or social 
 unity. In the divine the social principle itself achieves such 
 objectivity and finality as the existing level of social life can 
 appreciate. The tribal god, the national god, and the Universal 
 Father, all have this relation to our fundamental social impulses. 
 
 The child^s own parental instinct furnishes a natural 
 basis for early appreciation of divine fatherhood. On the 
 surface of the matter it is plain that whatever capacity a child 
 has for responding to the Christian evangel of the fatherhood of 
 God is at least parallel to filial attitudes toward one's earthly 
 parents. We are now ready, in view of the last section, to say 
 that it is not parallel, but identical. Moreover, in view of our 
 analysis of filial affection in the last chapter, it now appears 
 that children can make a vital response to the Christian God 
 
 1 Readers who desire to pursue these considerations further will find them 
 fully developed in my Psychology of Religion, especially chaps. IV and XIX. 
 
CHILDREN'S FAITH 143 
 
 because they themselves possess parental instinct. The yearn- 
 ing of the father toward the child, and the child's appreciation 
 of this yearning are qualitatively the same. It is in the im- 
 pulse to father somebody that the child's Christian experience 
 begins. We love God only when we take his point of view, 
 and we can take his point of view only through some experience 
 of our own in which we actually exercise godlike interest in 
 another. 
 
 In order to teach children of kindergarten age the love and 
 care of the Heavenly Father, the Sunday-school teacher of 
 to-day is likely to use as a part of her material the care of 
 father-bird and mother-bird for their offspring. How does 
 bird lore lead toward religion? Does the mind of such small 
 children construe divine fatherhood analytically, by means of 
 an analogy with feathered parenthood ? Or, does an induction 
 from different instances of parental care lead the heart up to 
 universal fatherhood? Far different from either of these is 
 the emotional logic of the kindergarten age. What happens is 
 that the child instinctively assumes a parental attitude toward 
 the helpless birdlings that have been brought to his attention, 
 and thereby, nascently entering into the fatherhood purpose, 
 he grasps the meaning of divine love. 
 
 It is easy, and educationally most appropriate, to awaken 
 in small children a sentiment of gratitude to the Heavenly 
 Father. What, then, is gratitude? Since it is an attitude 
 that one can take toward another who is older, stronger, and 
 not suffering, it appears at first sight to have no connection with 
 the instinct that leads a child to fondle dolls and pet animals 
 and smaller children. But A. F. Shand has shown that gratitude 
 involves some realization of what the kindness of a benefactor 
 has cost him, together with desire to requite this cost.^ Grati- 
 tude is not mere jubilation; it contains also a tender element. 
 This tenderness, as our discussion has shown, and as McDougall 
 holds,2 originates in parental instinct. McDougall is of the 
 opinion that moral indignation originates at the same point. 
 
 » Chap. XVI of G. F. Stout, Groundwork of Psychology' (New York, 1903). 
 >W. McDougall, Social Psychology (Boston, 1909), pp. 66-81. 
 
144 CHILDREN'S FAITH 
 
 No doubt it will seem odd to trace pity, gratitude, indigna- 
 tion, longing for justice and equality, and a child's fondness for 
 dolls and pets to one and the same source, even that in us that 
 makes us see worlds in the smile of our own offspring. But 
 thither the facts lead. They are of immense consequence for 
 all moral and religious education. For in them we find not only 
 evidence of capacity for moral and religious life in early child- 
 hood, but also the particular kinds of seed for which the young 
 mind is ready. 
 
 Other instincts, of course, have a part. Fears drive the child 
 to sheltering arms. Curiosity blends with the rest. G. E. 
 Dawson infers from children's questions that the "instinct for 
 causality" is a principal factor in child-religion,^ and Earl Barnes 
 looks upon the insistent who's and why's of the young mind as 
 signs of a theological interest.^ This interpretation seems, 
 however, to be made under the influence of the outworn dogmat- 
 ism that confuses religion with doctrine or philosophy. When- 
 ever the causal interest is central in the child mind, the appro- 
 priate category is science rather than religion. This is the 
 parent's opportunity to start the young intellect upon a cor- 
 rectly scientific analysis of the world. Religion gains nothing, 
 but loses much, through the well-intentioned answer, "God 
 did it," to questions that we adults answer to ourselves in terms 
 of science.^ 
 
 It has been said that children must first think of nature 
 after the fashion of mythology. Dawson even makes animism 
 an instinct of childhood.^ If this be so, the precept, "Never 
 
 1 The Child and His Religion (Chicago, 1909), p. 38. 
 
 2 Studies in Education, II, 1902, p. 287. 
 
 3 To Professor Dawson's precious collection of children's questions, I should 
 like to add this one from a boy of about five: "Mother, who weis my mamma 
 before you were?" Lack of space prevents me from discussing the incau- 
 tious use of the term "instinct" in Dawson's book, as "instinct for causality" 
 and "instinct of immortality." The naturalness of child religion, moreover, 
 seems to mean for him that religion is preformed, even to specific beliefs, 
 whereas the growth of mind is not primarily from one set of definite ideas to 
 another but from the indefinite toward the definite. On this point, see Irving 
 King, The Psychology of Child Development (Chicago, 1903), p. 243. An 
 analysis of Dawson's cases will show that, though the children in question re- 
 ceived little or no formal religious instruction, they were nevertheless under 
 the infiuence of the religious ideas of their elders. 
 
 *0p, cit., pp. 32 ff. 
 
CHILDREN'S FAITH 145 y 
 
 teach as true anything that must afterward be unlearned," 
 is unwise, perhaps impossible of application. But I find no 
 adequate evidence that small children are incapable of employ- 
 ing the causal category in the same manner as adults. Least 
 of all do the facts indicate that there is a definite stage of 
 spontaneous animistic belief in Tylor's sense of animism. 
 Rather, we find a continuous mental movement from indefinite 
 toward definite ideas, and from emotional thinking toward 
 abstraction and objectivity. Not, then, from experience of 
 nature, mythologically conceived, but from the experience of a 
 present social reality in the family, should we expect the Chri§r-^ 
 tian idea of God to grow. 
 
 A child can, to use BushnelPs words, "grow up a Chris- 
 tian, and never know himself as being otherwise." What- 
 ever be the case with other religions, the Christian religion, 
 which finds the whole meaning and destiny of man in divine 
 fatherhood and human brotherhood, is the flowering of a par- 
 ticular instinct that is active from infancy onward. To Ter- 
 tullian's argument that the soul is naturally Christian we may 
 now add that the child is naturally Christian. To the Chris- 
 tian idea of the All-Father the response (unless the child has 
 already been wounded and scarred by the unparental conduct 
 of others) is positive, free, and vital. Children love and trust 
 him; they struggle to obey him by kindly conduct; they desire 
 to help him in his work; they are grateful for his gifts. This 
 is Christian experience. 
 
 It is a tender thing, easily distorted, easily blighted. It 
 must have human fellowship in order to flourish. Only in and 
 through some human godlikeness that sustains what is parental^ 
 in us does any of us know the Father. Here is the deep meaning, 
 for childhood as well as for maturity, of the surpassing love 
 wherewith Jesus faced an unloving world. The spirit, the acts, 
 many of the words of Jesus appeal to little ones, to what is 
 elemental in them. Just as the Jewish children who heard him 
 say : " Let them come to me, for the kingdom of heaven belongs 
 to such as they are," must have clung to him and nestled in 
 his arms, so the children of to-day, imaginatively realizing him. 
 
146 CHILDREN'S FAITH 
 
 make him their actual leader, their helper, who saves them from 
 their own unsocial impulses. The church, as far as in its re- 
 lations to children it is really the church of Christ, makes the 
 same appeal to children and receives the same kind of response. 
 The church belongs to children just as their fathers and mothers 
 belong to them; and children belong to the church just as they 
 belong to families. That is, ideally they belong to the church, 
 from the standpoint of Jesus they belong to it, from the stand- 
 point of their own social capacities they belong to it. But 
 these capacities are as sensitive as they are beautiful; and there 
 are contrary capacities, too; and habit-forming begins at 
 birth. In order that a child may grow up a Christian and never 
 know himself as being otherwise he must have co-operation from 
 those who have the spirit of Christ. That is, the child must 
 have social education upon the Christian plane. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 THE RELIGIOUS LIMITATIONS OF CHILDREN 
 
 The respective educational consequences of a theory of 
 moral continuity in child growth and a theory of moral dis- 
 continuity. The view of child nature that has now been 
 sketched is different from certain opinions that are widely held 
 at the present moment. The last two chapters have shown that, 
 though antisocial instincts are active in the early years, socially 
 constructive ones also are present, and that even the par- 
 ticular instinct out of which spring the finest and most difficult 
 things in social progress begins its functions in infancy. Here 
 we found natural capacity for entering into the great and fun- 
 damental motives of the Christian religion, fatherhood and 
 brotherhood, and therefore a natural basis for Christian educa- 
 tion. 
 
 If this view is well founded, there is no necessary break, in 
 moral quality, between the life of an adult Christian and that 
 of a child who receives Christian nurture. The necessary dif- 
 ference between them concerns their respective range of experi- 
 ence, firmness of habit, and extent of foresight. An adult who 
 is already well trained knows better how to be kind to a dog, a 
 baby, a tuberculous family, a foreigner, a laboring man, a capi- 
 talist, a wife. With this wider knowledge of human relations 
 there goes, of course, the possibility of profounder emotional 
 appreciation of the character of God. Moreover, the well- 
 trained adult Christian has so many times resisted his unsocial 
 instincts, and indulged his social ones, and he has so often ex- 
 perienced the joy of Christian fellowship, that habit forming 
 has borne its fruit in the weakened power of some temptations, 
 the actual extinction of others, and relative ease in carrying 
 
 147 
 
148 CHILDREN'S LIMITATIONS 
 
 high impulses into effect. This difference between childhood 
 and maturity is great, but it is not a moral break. To attain 
 Christian maturity, a child needs only to go on exercising more 
 and more broadly, steadily, and intelligently certain impulses 
 of childhood itself.^ 
 
 But some voices are saying that childhood Is essentially ego- 
 istic, and that genuine unselfishness must wait for adolescence. 
 If this be true, we must postpone religious education in any vital 
 sense until adolescence, while through childhood we allow 
 motives to grow that must later be counteracted. This would 
 be a saltatory education — education by a leap into society as 
 contrasted with continuous growth within society as a member 
 of it. The widest-spread doctrine of this type is the recapitula- 
 tion theory that is taught by G. Stanley Hall and his pupils. 
 Another instance, which it will be convenient to discuss first, 
 is Ames's chapter on "Religion and Childhood." 2 
 
 Taking religion to be identical with "the fullest and most 
 intense social consciousness,"^ which is about equivalent to 
 the consciousness of the socially maturest persons, Ames finds 
 children profoundly deficient in capacity for religion. He 
 asserts: (1) That up to two and a half or three years human 
 beings are non-religious, non-moral, and non-personal ;^ (2) That 
 it is impossible for a child under the age of nine to pass in any 
 considerable degree beyond the non-religious and non-moral 
 attitude;^ (3) That the child has no "religious nature";^ 
 (4) That "The social feeling of adolescence is original, inner, 
 and urgent,"^ and that in adolescence "Religion arises nat- 
 urally, being an inherent and intimate phase of the social 
 
 1 In some of my earlier writings I emphasized the notion that a child is not 
 a diminutive adult, but something qualitatively as well as quantitatively dif- 
 ferent. Doctrinal systems, I said, even though abbreviated and expressed 
 in words of one syllable, do not fit. A small child's spontaneous interest 
 does not go out to the Trinity, but to dolls, dogs, hobby-horses, or a game 
 of tag. Moreover, some human relations, as that of conjugal affection, 
 one does not appreciate imtil the sexual instinct ripens. Finally, adult stand- 
 ards of right and wrong do not fit children, and attempts to make them fit 
 do injustice by reason of the gap between rewards and punishments and 
 anything that the child can imderstand. In this sense I still maintain that 
 a child is not a diminutive adult, but qualitatively different. But this does 
 not imply the kind of break in instinctive social capacities, and in social 
 education, that is in question in the above paragraph. 
 
 2E. S. Ames, Psychology of Religious Experience (Boston, 1910), chap. XI. 
 
 ».P. 197. « Pp.- 198, 209. ' P. 209. « P. 209. » P. 222. 
 
CHILDREN'S LIMITATIONS 149 
 
 consciousness."^ "For the individual, religion originates in 
 youth." 2 
 
 If all this be true, man has a religious nature, original, inner, 
 and urgent, which clearly makes its appearance with adoles- 
 cence. It is denied of young children because of their sup- 
 posed lack of capacity for social response.^ If, now, we should 
 discover that childhood is not set off from adolescence by any 
 such social incompetence, it would follow that children also, 
 in their measure, are religious by original nature. In a subse- 
 quent section I shall endeavor to show that the instinct of sex, 
 which is the distinctive basis of adolescent phenomena, is not 
 equal to the social task, which is nothing less than the social 
 transformation of the mind, that Ames and others lay upon it. 
 Meantime I would set over against the doctrine of the social 
 incapacity of childhood the evidence, already adduced, of the 
 early appearance of parental instinct. 
 
 The recapitulation theory is a special and recent form of an 
 idea, long held, that there is some sort of parallel between child 
 life and the " childhood of the race." That there is a consider- 
 able degree of similarity between them is clear. Both the race 
 and the individual show a movement of mind from immediate 
 ends toward remote ones; from immediate data of sense toward 
 thought structures of greater and greater complexity; from 
 the impulsiveness of instinct and of crowd action toward self- 
 control and social deliberation; from a narrower to a broader 
 range of social regard. A consequence for education is that 
 young children take the freshest interest in, and are best trained 
 by, objects and processes that correspond in simplicity and in 
 sensuous appeal to the objects and processes with which early 
 man occupied himself, and that as children grow older their 
 ability to be interested in the complexities of civilization grows 
 also. A child of six takes voraciously to Bopp's descriptions 
 of primitive man's struggles with dangerous beasts; how old 
 must one be, the teacher has to ask, before the struggles of the 
 Roundheads with the Cavaliers arrest and hold attention ? 
 
 iP. 249. 2 p. 214. 
 
 •Ames's overcaution, not to seem to attribute a religious "instinct" to 
 primitive men, suggests the possibility that I have taken too literally his state- 
 ments concerning adolescence. See pp. 49, 50. 
 
150 CHILDREN'S LIMITATIONS 
 
 The special form that the recapitulation theory gives to this 
 old idea is as follows: (1) The theory asserts that the growth 
 of the individual mind shows a succession of definite forms that 
 correspond in motive, content, and order of emergence to defi- 
 nite stages in racial evolution; (2) That this succession in the 
 individual is not determined by anything in his environment, 
 such as his associations, but is predetermined as a set of suc- 
 cessively ripening instincts; (3) That the proper mental and 
 moral food for each period of child growth is to be gathered 
 from the level of the instinct then in action, not from later and 
 higher levels of culture.^ 
 
 The popular, and here and there the literary, interpretation 
 of recapitulation runs to the effect that children, or at least 
 boys, are different from adults in the same way that savagery 
 is different from civilization, savagery being interpreted in terms 
 of its coarseness and of its relative disregard for the pains and 
 the pleasures of men and of animals. 
 
 Before examining the grounds for this theory, let us note 
 its educational implications. At each period of growth, says 
 the theory, feed the particular instinct that is then dominant. 
 The child's goodness at the time, and his progress toward 
 mature goodness, are to be measured by the fulness with which 
 he enters into the spirit, the aims, and the characteristic activi- 
 ties of the lower order of society that his then dominant instinct 
 reflects. That is — if we press the point to the utmost — we 
 are to educate children for family, church, and state, not by 
 enlarging as much as we can children's present participation 
 in them, but by withholding and postponing common life on 
 these levels. Social segregation of children with children, and 
 of adults with adults, would then be the preliminary condition 
 of educational efficiency. If we ask how, then, children are 
 ever to acquire an Interest In the higher social organizations 
 and standards, and how adjustment to these standards is to 
 be effected, the answer is that adolescence brings a spontaneous 
 impulse to something like a conversion from egoism to altruism. 
 This leap Into the new life will take place through the innate, 
 1 References to sources are postponed to the Classified Bibliography. 
 
CHILDREN'S LIMITATIONS 151 
 
 internal forces of the individual, it is assumed, if only appro- 
 priate material for these forces to act upon is present. 
 
 If nature has provided for social continuity in the growth of 
 a child, then the process of social education can be sketched as 
 follows, with the contrasting consequences of the recapitulation 
 theory stated point by point. 
 
 (1) Theory of continuity: Social education first sees to it that 
 the child is provided with wealth of human association, association 
 with adults as well as with children. To this kind of experience 
 various instinctive responses are made by the child, one or more 
 of them social in a finally valid sense, that is, in the same sense 
 in which the best conduct of adults is social. The teacher picks 
 out these socially valid responses, and endeavors to give them such 
 a distinctive place in the child's experience (by means of satisfac- 
 tions associated with them) that they will have a permanent in- 
 fluence upon his character. 
 
 Theory of recapitulation: Provide the child with plenty of things, 
 animal pets, and other children; this is the chief and essential 
 educational service that adults can render at the beginning. 
 
 (2) Theory of continuity: The teacher now has the task of pro- 
 moting repetition of these particularly wholesome responses, and 
 of preventing repetition of the contrary ones. Therefore condi- 
 tions are so arranged that discomfort accompanies the latter, and 
 satisfaction the former, especially shared satisfactions, and these 
 conditions are steadily repeated as often as the situations that 
 tend to call out the responses recur. The result is the forma- 
 tion of certain social habits, and suppression of unsocial instincts 
 by lack of exercise. 
 
 Theory of recapitulation: The instincts are given right of way, 
 with no such careful selection by the teacher. For it is held that 
 the exercise of an instinct on its own plane makes it not more 
 attractive, but less so, at the next stage of growth. Let the 
 teacher provide plenty of material for the expression of the in- 
 stincts that are dominant. 
 
 (3) Theory of continuity: As the child's social contacts widen, 
 his social responses become more and more complicated, and his 
 capacity for continuity in social relations increases. The teacher 
 carries into each fresh situation the same principle of selection 
 and of habit forming as before, but attempts to organize the whole- 
 
152 CHILDREN'S LIMITATIONS 
 
 some responses In the form of more and more systematic and broad 
 co-operation — co-operation of children with children, and of 
 children with adults. Therefore the policy of the teacher is to 
 admit the children to a part in adult social enterprises. 
 
 Theory of recapitulation: Organizations of children with chil- 
 dren on their own plane are sufficient for social education. Let 
 children settle their social relations to one another by the clash 
 of opposing instincts. 
 
 (4) Theory of continuity: Since the problem of society is to 
 produce free individuality rather than mechanized conduct, and 
 also to improve society itself rather than repeat its own perform- 
 ances, the teacher does not stop with a set of habits that con- 
 form to a set of ethical rules, but goes on to awaken reflective 
 intelligence with respect to what one is doing, why it should or 
 should not be done, and how it can be improved, that is, made 
 mutually more satisfactory. Thus, to instinct and habit, analyti- 
 cal reason is added, and genuinely voluntary purposes are formed. 
 Material for this analysis, which proceeds by comparison, is drawn 
 not only from child life and from cruder stages of adult society, 
 but also from the best that is in contemporary social institutions. 
 Thus, intellectually as well as affectively (in respect to satisfac- 
 tions and dissatisfactions) the child is kept in growing fellowship 
 with his elders. 
 
 Theory of recapitulation: The child's social insight will grow 
 most certainly and normally if he is kept in rich intellectual 
 fellowship with culture epochs of a lower order until the middle or 
 later years of adolescence bring him face to face with the society 
 that he is about to enter as a full member. 
 
 (5) Theory of continuity: The analysis of situations and of 
 responses is so guided that it not only transforms instinct acts 
 already habitual with the pupil into voluntary purposes, but also 
 leads the pupil to ask what he himself really wants, and so to 
 imagine and desire ideal good. An ideal is a more distant goal by 
 reference to which we judge our particular purposes, and correct 
 them. The process of idealizing, when it is not arrested In mere 
 sentimentality, goes on to the identification of one's own weal 
 and woe with the fate of the ideal, and thus makes the purpose 
 of progress a constituent or modifier of all other purposes. Society 
 thus trains her pupils to re-create their educator. 
 
 Theory of recapitulation: The upspringing of moral self-con- 
 sciousness will be a part of the broad emotional agitation that 
 
CHILDREN'S LIMITATIONS 153 
 
 ushers in the maturity of the sexual instinct. Youth will dream 
 dreams, and see visions, and acquire reforming fervor as a phase 
 of instinctive adolescent longing. 
 
 The contrast between these two conceptions of the attainment 
 of moral self-consciousness is not slight. One of them makes 
 it an achievement, the other makes it an eruption of volcanic fire; 
 one makes it a discriminating attitude that accompanies analysis, 
 the other makes it an emotional unrest that has yet to become 
 acquainted with its appropriate objects; one puts at its dis- 
 posal, in the whole gradual process of its upspringing, the moral 
 experience of the race, the other lets the individual meet himself 
 in the isolation in which fears, and conceits, and hasty choices are 
 born. 
 
 This is the logic of the contrasting theories. To what extent 
 the practice of teachers follows the logic of either theory is 
 another matter. Let there be no misunderstanding as to the 
 purpose of this analysis; it aims merely to make the elements 
 of the problem stand out unmistakably. Another possible mis- 
 understanding may grow out of the fact that the analysis is 
 presented in the form of a numerical series. These five points 
 in the theory of continuity do not represent so many successive 
 steps, to be taken at successive periods of the child's growth, 
 but five aspects of the sort of stimulus that society would 
 continuously provide under the supposition that the social 
 growth of the child can naturally be continuous rather than 
 broken. The recapitulation theory Implies that at each stage 
 of growth the child leaves behind the self-and-society that was 
 his at the preceding stage. But the theory of continuity, 
 holding that the social growth of mind consists In defining 
 what was at the outset relatively Indefinite, In stabilizing what 
 was relatively unstable, in differentiating what was relatively 
 simple, and in bringing impulse under the control of permanent 
 choices, implies that the child carries his self-and-society along 
 through the years, enriching It as he goes. 
 
 The positive service that the theory of recapitulation 
 has rendered to social education. There is no mistaking the 
 fact that, coincident with, and under stimulus from, the spread- 
 
154 CHILDREN'S LIMITATIONS 
 
 ing doctrine of recapitulation a great awakening began with 
 respect to methods in the moral training of boys, and to a slight 
 extent of girls. In the boys' departments of Young Men's 
 Christian Associations, in Sunday-school classes and clubs, 
 in the general boys' club movement, and in camps and schools 
 for boys, we witness something that has not only the zest of 
 newness, but also the zest of an obvious reality, or corre- 
 spondence with life itself. I shall raise a question by and by 
 as to the validity of some of the tendencies that have appeared, 
 but without doubting that the new training is better than the 
 old in point of freedom and spontaneity, in point of initiative 
 and constructiveness, in the number of its contacts with nature, 
 in its care for physical well being and for play, and in point of 
 co-operation and of training therein. 
 
 Moral training of the individual through present group 
 life on the natural level of the pupil — this is now axiomatic 
 among educators of boys. It has become axiomatic with the 
 practical Workers largely because, under the influence of the 
 glittering recapitulation theory, they undertook, as perhaps no 
 teachers had ever undertaken before, to get the pupil's point 
 of view, see through his eyes, feel wdth him, act with him. 
 There was nothing new, to be sure, in the doctrine that the 
 teacher must bend himself to the pupil's natural interests. 
 But here was proclamation of a supposed law of the child's 
 successive interests, a law that implied that children's social 
 interests are even, for the tim^, opposed to those that are habit- 
 ual with the teacher. Here was a challenge to the teacher 
 to stretch his imagination and his sympathies as nothing in 
 the general doctrine of interest and apperception had hereto- 
 fore required him to do. Moreover, the study of boys' gangs 
 as an instance of the supposed recapitulation results in an 
 attempt to use the gang type of sociality as an educational 
 agency. In order to use it, the leader had to become a member 
 of it, and be obedient to laws not of his own devising. 
 
 This is too brief a statement to represent all the wide-spread 
 effort to enter actively and sincerely into the realities of chil- 
 dren's social motives, but it is sufficient to indicate ways in 
 
CHILDREN'S LIMITATIONS 155 
 
 which the recapitulation theory has had an unquestionably 
 vitalizing effect upon moral training. We need not stint our 
 recognition of this effect if we go on to inquire whether we have 
 reached the end of the matter. Is it not possible that if we 
 rigorously apply the recapitulation theory we shall fix children 
 in immature social motives? Granted that fellowship is the 
 basis of social education, does It follow that fellowship is possible 
 only on the basis of children's crude instinctive social inter- 
 actions, and not also on the basis of adult enterprises? The 
 teacher must reach down, no doubt; is It certain that children 
 should not be expected to reach up ? 
 
 Does the social life of children instinctively recapit- 
 ulate the social evolution of the race? The only sense in 
 which an answer can here be attempted is that of an enumera- 
 tion of points involved, with some indication of sources in which 
 the positions here taken are discussed at greater length. 
 
 (1) The theory took its start from supposed traces of bodily 
 recapitulation in the embryo. But "the view . . . that em- 
 bryonic development is essentially a recapitulation of ancestral 
 history must be given up. ' '(^ 
 
 (2) With reference to the brain in particular it does not hold. 
 ** Man's brain in general follows in its growth a course enormously 
 unlike that by which it developed in the race."^ 
 
 (3) Where comparison of the two mental series, racial and men- 
 tal, can safely be made, "what little is known is rather decidedly 
 against any close parallelism of the two." ^ 
 
 (4) The sex instinct, which presents in its late ripening the su- 
 preme case of a social acceleration of the individual that is both 
 marked and fairly universal, ripens early in the race, but late in 
 the individual. 
 
 (5) Further — and this has peculiar weight against those who 
 have relied upon adolescence for evidence of recapitulation — 
 whereas in the race the sex instinct does not appear until it is physi- 
 
 1 Adam Sedgwick, "Embryology," in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed. 
 
 2 Thomdike, op. cit., p. 255. 
 
 s Ibid., p. 256. Thomdike's whole chapter should be read. An extended 
 analysis of both the biological and the psychological evidence will be foimd 
 in Davidson, P. E., The Recapitulation Theory and Human Infancy (New York, 
 1914). 
 
156 CHILDREN'S LIMITATIONS 
 
 ologlcally employed, in the individual it appears, and begins to 
 influence social groupings, long before reproduction is possible. 
 
 (6) Parental instinct, as we have seen at length, does not co- 
 incide, in its appearance and growth, with procreation or with 
 capacity therefor. Here again an instinct that has tremendous 
 social significance appears earlier in the individual series than in the 
 racial series. 
 
 (7) If any one should hold that, even though other evidence for 
 recapitulation be leaky, common observation of boys shows them 
 to be little savages anyhow, whereas in adolescence they attain to 
 something like civilization, the following answer could be made: 
 **The" boy, who figures so largely as the living demonstration to 
 the popular mind, is a socially neglected boy. He is the boy on 
 the street; or the boy in a boys' school, removed from normal 
 family relationships; or the boy who goes to extremes because he 
 has been misunderstood and mishandled; or the boy who has 
 simply lacked suflicient fellowship with older persons to show 
 what he is socially capable of. Social capacities do not sprout 
 in a vacuum, much less under thumb-screws. Nor does a child's 
 possible social reach appear until he has something to reach 
 toward. We need sorely to realize that what to reach toward can 
 be revealed to a boy only through acquaintance with those who are 
 further advanced. A boy who lives in a good house surrounded 
 by wholesome things, the roof of which covers also refined and 
 affectionate parents, may nevertheless be socially neglected, that 
 is, lack opportunity to take the part that he is capable of taking 
 in the doings of his elders. Over against the results of all these 
 kinds of neglect stands a multitude of boys who have grown up 
 in co-operative fellowship with adults, and as a consequence have 
 conducted themselves in such a civilized way that they have not 
 attracted attention to themselves. In short, the argument from 
 current observation unintentionally picks its cases, and then attrib- 
 utes to original nature social limitations that arise from deficien- 
 cies in boys* social opportunities. 
 
 (8) The evidence from current observation that is adduced 
 in support of the theory of recapitulation is derived almost ex- 
 clusively from boy life, scarcely at all from girl life. Why? In 
 part, we need not doubt, because girls, being kept in closer con- 
 tact with adult life in the home, and having more opportunity 
 to co-operate with a parent in important duties, develop earlier 
 the social capacities that are common to boys and girls. 
 
CHILDREN'S LIMITATIONS 157 
 
 The sociaL significance of adolescence. That adolescence 
 brings changes in the child's social capacities and spontaneous 
 interests, and that these changes are of momentous consequence 
 for social education, no one will question. But that undue 
 reliance has been placed upon the socializing influence of the 
 instinct that now ripens may be asserted without hesitation. 
 Adolescence offers fresh, unique opportunity for social educa- 
 tion; but instinct does not do the work of educating. The 
 opportunity is unique because: (1) There is instinctive effort 
 to please persons of the opposite sex. This regard for others 
 may be extended beyond the courtship process.^ (2) The fact 
 of loosing oneself from dependence upon parents to begin in- 
 dependent life is of itself an assertion of individuality; it may 
 become an incentive to reflective weighing of life's ethical 
 alternatives; it may be the occasion of great choices. (3) The 
 general state of restlessness, excitement, and general emotional 
 susceptibility (as for beauty in nature and in art) makes it 
 comparatively easy to acquire new interests and enthusiasms, 
 which may be highly idealistic and social. Adolescence tends 
 to make the human soil mellow, but mellowness of soil does 
 not determine whether the harvest shall be wheat or tares. 
 (4) More or less parental tenderness, obviously instinctive, 
 mixes with sexual instinct in the attitudes of lovers toward each 
 other. On this compound instinctive basis family life on the 
 highest ethical plane may be built, and this life may radiate into 
 community organization and into world society. 
 
 What an opportunity is this for social education I But 
 
 the same thing that makes it an opportunity for education 
 
 makes it also an open road to evil. The period of adolescence, 
 
 and the magnetism of its characteristic instinct, fasten upon the 
 
 individual the worst faults that the race has developed. That 
 
 criminality here gets its chief entrance into the mind is a serious 
 
 enough fact, but it is not the most serious one. The profound- 
 
 est and the most prolific of all evils in the world is the selfish 
 
 use of the sex instinct. 
 
 1 Under the term "courtship process" I include not only the consciously 
 intended preliminaries to marriage, but also the preceding years of taking an 
 interest in, and making oneself interesting to, persons of the opposite sex. 
 
158 CHILDREN'S LIMITATIONS 
 
 There is no need to dwell upon the phases of this evil that 
 are prominent in the public mind. There are in addition mo- 
 mentous phases of it that the public thinks nothing about. 
 Even aside from all question of social vice, social idealisms 
 that sprout in childhood and blossom in youth are largely 
 shrivelled by conjugal experience following an undisciplined 
 adolescence. Selfishness in this relation means arrest of 
 social capacity, a hardening of the personality that is likely 
 to affect all the relations that one has with one's fellows. It 
 inevitably affects the children in the family, though they know 
 nothing of its existence. For selfishness in the conjugal rela- 
 tion is per se the drying up of tender regard for the personality 
 of another, and tender regard springs from parental instinct. 
 One cannot henceforth be a whole parent to one's children, 
 much less train them for future parenthood. 
 
 The canker of this selfishness spreads directly also, not merely 
 through one's children, to relations between persons in the larger 
 social units. Tender regard for the personality of another, 
 which is none other than justice in one's soul — this, wrought 
 into habit by self-discipline in the most intimate association of 
 husband and wife, forms an excellent background and prepara- 
 tion for the recognition of personality in business and in civic 
 affairs, while absence of this soul's justice at home bodes ill for 
 the world outside. Granted that there is no absolute guarantee 
 that a social quality that is habitual in one human relation 
 will be transferred to different relations; granted that we are 
 bundles of inconsistencies; nevertheless it is a safe assump- 
 tion that what my family is to me can easily affect my valuation 
 of the family life of my employees, and that in the by-and- 
 large this effect will occur frequently in a large society. Justice 
 in the conjugal relation will tend, in the long run, to inject 
 domestic considerations into the wage problem, the problems 
 of civic betterment, the problem of industrial disputes, and 
 the problem of war. 
 
 When we consider all this in addition to the vice and criminal- 
 ity that get their impulse from the adolescent condition of 
 mind, we shall see that incalculable evil and incalculable good 
 
CHILDREN'S LIMITATIONS 159 
 
 depend upon the direction that is given to the instinct that 
 comes to maturity in this period. The sex instinct is not self- 
 directing toward the ends of just society — this is evident. 
 Like all other useful instincts, it requires training. It requires 
 training more, possibly, than any other, and not merely in the 
 way of restraint because of its possibilities for evil, but also 
 in the way of positive development into a defined and noble 
 social purpose. Reliance for the right social fruitage of adoles- 
 cence is not to be placed upon even the fine spontaneities of 
 youth, but upon educational foresight and skill. 
 
 The social limitations of adolescence appear, too, from the 
 fact that it accomplishes its full instinctive work under various 
 social systems, under any system, in fact, that permits be- 
 tween the sexes the relations of courtship and marriage. The 
 primary impulses of youth find outlet under any form of govern- 
 ment; at every level of social organization, from the savage 
 tribe to the great modern state; under social institutions that 
 range through the whole scale from slavery to Industrial democ- 
 racy. What kind of society we shall have depends In no appre- 
 ciable degree upon the sex Instinct as such, but upon the place 
 it occupies in a great complex of instincts, habits, assumptions, 
 and ideals.^ 
 
 The relation of adolescence to childhood*s social habits. 
 The irruption of a fresh instinct that profoundly stirs the whole 
 psychophysical organism offers a specially favorable oppor- 
 tunity for the basal educational process of habit making and 
 habit breaking. One notices things not noticed before, reacts 
 to them, experiences satisfactions and dissatisfactions of new 
 varieties, and presto ! the youth has "taken to" fiction, poetry, 
 history, pictures, natural scenery, sport, good clothes, educa- 
 tion, business, politics, or what not. Most certainly of all, 
 he takes to some social circle, which may easily be one unknown 
 and undreamed of In his childhood. 
 
 So rapid and so radical are the shiftings of adolescence from 
 the personal groupings of childhood, and so positive is the de- 
 
 » The significance of adolescence for religious conversion wiU be considered 
 in the next chapter. 
 
160 CHILDREN'S LIMITATIONS 
 
 sire not to be a child any longer, that the observer can easily 
 get an impression that what occurs is not only a social quicken- 
 ing but also a social break with the individual's past. This 
 impression is deepened by reactions made by youths who en- 
 counter parental opposition to the laying aside of childhood's 
 dependence and subordination. 
 
 Before we commit ourselves to the opinion that adolescence is 
 such a break, however, we should remind ourselves that a peace- 
 ful river, if it is obstructed by a dam, may break the barrier 
 and become a destructive flood. Many a parent, blunderingly 
 preferring that his child should remain a child, and resenting 
 the individuality and the new social attachments that youth 
 brings, produces the social refractoriness that he blames upon 
 the hot blood of youth. That is, the break in such cases is 
 not brought about by growth into adolescence any more than 
 by resistance to such growth. 
 
 Educators, moreover, should have no illusions as to the 
 relation of the laws of habit to the adolescent period. It is 
 a truism when one speaks it, and yet it needs to be said, that 
 provision must be made for forming, not social habits (for some 
 social connections will be made anyway), but the particular 
 sort of social habits that is required by the democracy toward 
 which the Christian purpose aspires. Adolescence can produce 
 snobbery more easily than democracy. In fact, no small part 
 of social education at this period consists in widening out the 
 purposes of groups already formed upon the basis of a narrow 
 and exclusive regard of a few for a few. Here again the in- 
 dicated educational method is admittance of the young to social 
 groups and to social practice that are more mature than youth 
 itself would spontaneously devise. 
 
 The theory of recapitulation, when it asserts that childhood 
 is essentially egoistic, and that genuine altruism must wait 
 for adolescence, seems to assume that selfish habits, made 
 strong by exercise through the whole of childhood, somehow 
 become null and void when one passes from childhood to youth. 
 Is this true? We have already seen that the sexual instinct 
 is not, of itself, unambiguously social except in a narrow sense; 
 
CHILDREN'S LIMITATIONS 161 
 
 it can easily mingle with Itself other impulses so as to form a 
 complex whole that is tender and beautiful as well as strong; 
 but it can also be cruel, hard, blind, savage, weak. The par- 
 ticular complex of social attitudes that are henceforth to prevail 
 is not at all predictable from anything in this one instinct. 
 Just as in childhood, so here, the personality is formed by a 
 multitude of particular experiences that bring multiform in- 
 stinctive satisfactions and dissatisfactions. The bonds that 
 are now formed with one's fellows are bonds of habit as well as 
 of instinct. 
 
 Not only must habit forming still go on; the whole of it 
 will be affected by preadolescent social experience. Nothing 
 occurs that can at a stroke wipe old selfish habits off the slate. 
 On the face of the matter, how can one suppose that instinctive 
 attraction for the opposite sex will reverse an already firm habit 
 with respect to one's own sex ? Even a youth's attitudes toward 
 the opposite sex are like the householder's treasure, which con- 
 tains things new and old. The kind of mother a boy has 
 associated with for more than a dozen years; the way his father 
 has treated her, and the way she has responded to this treat- 
 ment; the sort of sex distinctions that have been cm-rent in the 
 boy's social environment; the amount and the qualities of the 
 comradeship that he has had with girls; the treatment of women 
 to which he has been witness everywhere, all these leave in his 
 mind a sediment so firm that it seems to him to be bed rock, 
 nature itself. 
 
 These social assumptions are not necessarily affected by his 
 new emotions toward girls and women. He can adore a female 
 without stopping to ask whether women should be treated as 
 equals or as inferiors ; and he can actually treat the adored one 
 as an inferior without ceasing to adore. He can even magnify 
 the virtue of his affection on the ground that he, a superior 
 creature, bestows himself upon an inferior! By the comple- 
 mentary process, too, girls can come to prefer such male atten- 
 tions to any other. The whole instinctive adolescent process 
 can run its course between the fences of almost any social 
 system. To change the figure, the social attitudes of a youth 
 
162 CHILDREN'S LIMITATIONS 
 
 are not like a garden bed of plants just breaking through the 
 soil, and all springing from freshly planted seeds of one and the 
 same variety, but like a bed in which annuals, biennials, and 
 perennials mix, the tender shoots standing side by side with 
 plants that are fibrous and stiff from years of growth. 
 
 It follows that educational methods that segregate children 
 in such a way as to narrow their social experience tend toward 
 permanent arrest of social growth. It may well be that for 
 particular purposes boys should practise co-operation with boys, 
 and girls with girls, but a general policy of sex segregation, 
 placed within the actual historical setting of the present, can- 
 not fail to leave permanent marks of social impoverishment 
 upon both sexes, an impoverishment that makes both of them 
 unready for certain essentials of democracy. Again, the segre- 
 gation of younger children from older ones, and the segregation 
 of children of any age from adult companionship and from 
 adult thought and enterprise, leave some social capacities un-. 
 developed, and harden the remaining ones into a dominant life 
 attitude. 
 
 Of course gradation of pupils and of material is essential 
 for certain purposes, but the nature of proper gradation is easily 
 misconceived. Pupils are often graded down to that which is 
 easy for them instead of being graded up toward the most 
 advanced of their interests; or the average performance of an 
 age group is taken as a satisfactory standard for each member 
 of it, whereas there are wide variations within such groups; 
 or an assumption is made that the interests and capacities of 
 an individual go up like an elevator, all at once, whereas their 
 ascent is uneven, like that of a band of children frolicking up a 
 stairway. If the possibilities of co-operation between younger 
 and older are found in a given case to cover only a narrow area, 
 we must not conclude that co-operation within this narrow area 
 is educationally unimportant. This particular readiness of a 
 child may be an open road toward a valuable social habit; ex- 
 perience at this point may awaken further interests; the joy 
 of achievement here may raise the level of all his work. 
 
 The cordiality of our recognition of social values in new 
 
CHILDREN'S LIMITATIONS 1G3 
 
 types of bo3^s' club work must now be tempered by reserve as 
 to a single point. As far as these clubs take boys out of edu- 
 cationally wholesome homes; as far as parents are encouraged 
 to transfer their educational responsibility to the boys' work 
 specialist; as far as this specialist conceals the man in himself in 
 order to be a boy with the boys; as far as he binds the boys to 
 himself rather than to the social order; to the extent that he 
 encourages not only the processes of tribal society but also its 
 social standards — to this extent social arrest will mix with social 
 growth. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 THE STRUGGLE WITH SIN 
 
 "Sin" is a social conception. WTien I was a boy I was 
 
 taught that sin is a relation, not between me and my neighbor, 
 but between me and God. Subsequent reflection has led me to 
 regard the distinction here made as not vaHd. The intimacy of 
 the two Great Commandments to each other is too close. The 
 dwelHng place of the Highest is not apart from, but within, 
 the brotherhood, which is the family of God and the kingdom of 
 God. I find neither psychological, nor ethical, nor meta- 
 physical footing for the idea that I can have relations with God 
 in which he and I are isolated from all other society. My 
 very being as a conscious indi\ddual is bound up with that of 
 my fellows; a divine judgment upon what I am and upon what 
 I will to be is yer se a judgment upon my reciprocal human re- 
 lationships. Nor can I judge God otherwise. The only mean- 
 ing that I can give to his supreme goodness, the only ground that 
 I can assign for bowing my will to his, is that he enters into the 
 human social process more fully, more constructively, than I do. 
 The need for any such term as sin lies in the fact that we men, 
 in addition to constructing the human society in which God 
 and men are both sharers, also obstruct it and in some measure 
 destroy. We must now as educators face the fact that we do, 
 individually and collectively, oppose, resist, and undo our own 
 work of social upbuilding. We must inquire into the ground in 
 human nature for the slowness, the delays, the backsets, and 
 the defeat of ourselves by ourselves that are so obviously a 
 part of the process of establishing the democracy of God. 
 
 The lodgment of sin in the individual and in society. 
 In the light of our previous analysis it is possible to go at once 
 to an inventory of the negative factors with which we have to 
 reckon. 
 
 164 
 
SIN 165 
 
 (1) We have anti-social instincts. They have been enumerated 
 already. What needs to be noted in addition is that they are 
 not so many isolated impulses, but factors that by various men- 
 tal processes are built into the personality and into the struc- 
 ture of society. 
 
 (2) The exercise of anti-social as well as of social instincts is 
 pleasurable. The satisfaction of grabbing; of greedy possession ; 
 of venting envy, jealousy, and wrath; of hunting, fighting, and 
 mastering, as well as of sexual license — this satisfaction is what 
 makes all of them hard to resist. Only psychological blindness 
 and educational folly could teach that the pleasures of sin are 
 a delusion. Some sinful pleasures are evanescent, it is true, 
 but not all. Some bring pain in their wake, but not all, and 
 there are great possibilities of foresighted calculation and pre- 
 vention of disagreeable consequences. Social impulses have a 
 way of disturbing the dreams of selfishness, it is true, but then, 
 social impulses can be quieted ! 
 
 (3) The laws of habit formation are indifferent to social values; 
 therefore a child who experiences satisfaction in his anti-social 
 acts has in himself no protection from anti-social habits. A par- 
 ticular child may be so situated that the constructive social 
 instincts, being called out oftener and yielding greater pleasure 
 than the anti-social ones, counteract them. Such situations 
 the educator deliberately arranges, and he also attaches dis- 
 satisfactions to the anti-social reactions. But there is nothing 
 in the child's own habit-forming mechanism that does this for 
 him. In the absence of help from others, or of some fortunate 
 chance mixture of conditions, he forms anti-social habits as 
 spontaneously as social ones. As a matter of fact, education 
 has not yet perfected its control of the habits of even one 
 child. Every one makes anti-social instinctive reactions, ex- 
 periences pleasure from them, as a result repeats them with 
 added vigor, and thus becomes a victim of habits which educa- 
 tion has to devise methods for breaking. 
 
 (4) One's habits of conduct reflect themselves in one's social 
 thinking, sometimes as a formulated premise the truth of which is 
 assumed, sometimes as a control of attention whereby social facts 
 
 REIGMEn READING ROOM 
 \ PRINCEJOH, N. J. 
 
166 SIN 
 
 of some sorts are noticed and evaluated, while social facts of other 
 sorts are not. Thus, in a perfectly natural way, anti-social prin- 
 ciples and rules of conduct mix with social ones. A thing tends 
 to be defined in our thinking by that which we habitually notice 
 in it. A pine-tree is not the same sort of thing to a lumberjack 
 as to a John Muir. Just so, " human nature" is, in the thinking 
 of each of us, that which we habitually notice in our fellows. 
 Now, what we habitually notice is that which we have to take 
 account of in carrying out our own purposes and lines of con- 
 duct. Many of us not only initiate our plans from our own self- 
 ishness, but in the execution of them awaken self-regarding 
 impulses in others. Thereupon we judge that human nature 
 is rootedly selfish ! You will find no one so doggedly certain of 
 this as the man who makes profits by stimulating other men's 
 cupidity. On the other hand, you will find no one so certain 
 of the inherent nobility of human nature as those who make 
 opportunity for such nobility to show itself. 
 
 Thus it is that anti-social instincts, confirmed by habit, be- 
 come a basis of anti-social thinking. Probably most persons 
 suppose that the order of psychological dependence is the re- 
 verse of this, at least in part. Justifying their habits by their 
 thinking, they imagine that their habits are a product of rea- 
 son. Socrates, indeed, held that the reason that we do wrong 
 is that we do not clearly see what is right. Aristotle, on the 
 other hand, took the position that practice is itself one of the 
 sources of insight. Without going into some fine questions 
 thus raised, we may say that psychology justifies, on the whole, 
 the tendency of Aristotle's thought at this point. Thoughts 
 about what is worthy of approval do not begin until we have 
 already approved and condemned many things. It is by reflec- 
 tion upon these judgments, already made, and by reaffirming 
 some of them, that we arrive at principles for future conduct. 
 
 Sin gets control of our thinking, then, as follows: First we 
 experience enjoyment in some anti-social reaction; the enjoy- 
 ment stimulates to repetition of the act; a habit is thus started; 
 we cherish the memory of the experience; then relate it in 
 thought to other things so as to make a system, and to provide 
 
SIN 167 
 
 for unlimited repetition; this thought system in turn becomes 
 a habit, and now, behold, the unsocial principle that has been 
 derived from instinct is henceforth taken as an axiom of social 
 life. 
 
 (5) Anti-social instincts, habits, and ways of thinking are 
 intrenched in social institutions, in customs, and in 'public opin- 
 ion. Society expects selfishness from individuals, and to some 
 extent actually rewards it. If we look at society in historical 
 perspective, we perceive that it is, on the whole, an evolu- 
 tionary process in which we are working out the beast, and 
 training ourselves to have regard for what is humane. The or- 
 ganized faults that are in society did not, of course, originate 
 in any fall from a perfectly organized common life; they are 
 simply parts of our instinctive endowment that, confirmed by 
 habit and by being made premises for thought, restimulate 
 themselves from generation to generation by informal education. 
 
 The social conditions into which a child is born actually train 
 him, though unintentionally for the most part, to be selfish 
 within these conventional limits. It is true that society praises 
 unstinted generosity; it admires, though with more reserve, 
 the fine and sturdy justice that asks for only a democrat's share, 
 and endeavors to secure as much for others. But it takes for 
 granted that these will be exceptional. A general low average 
 of self-seeking is socially expected. Success, in common par- 
 lance, connotes getting something for oneself, and the mass 
 pays homage to success. At the crucially important point of 
 sex morality, young men who are willing to make the fight 
 for character cannot yet count upon effective social support 
 from either men or women. 
 
 When a morally thoughtful parent or teacher witnesses the 
 generous and trustful impulses of childhood, or the glowing 
 idealism of youth, he sighs to think of the disillusionment that 
 is to come when, "getting into the world," one meets its hard- 
 ness, and is in turn hardened. The withering of ideals as the 
 dews of life's morning are dried up by the heat of competition, 
 of greed, of political self-seeking, and of licentiousness, is the 
 continuous tragedy of education. Sin, that is to say, has social 
 
168 SIN 
 
 organs by which It is transmitted through the generations, 
 positively preventing the young from even attempting to follow 
 out in maturity their best social impulses. Generation after 
 generation social capacities that are certainly here are wasted 
 by society itself. 
 
 Sin, then, is rooted in instinct, confirmed by habit, and prop- 
 agated by informal social education. Let us have no illu- 
 sions with respect to the cost of democracy. Education for 
 democracy has to face, not only unsocial traits in the child's 
 original nature, but also a social system that brings them out, 
 sustains them, justifies them in popular thinking, and rewards 
 them when they "succeed." 
 
 The possibility of success in educating for democracy lies in 
 the fact, first of all, that in our selfishness we are not at one 
 with ourselves, but are stirred to unselfishness also by instinct, 
 and by the habits and institutions that have arisen therefrom, 
 and second, that selfishness and brotherliness do not have 
 equal capacity for organizing themselves. Love of one another 
 produces a degree of co-operation, which is the massing of hu- 
 man energy, that is impossible to greed, licentiousness, and the 
 lust of power. Selfishness tends to disorganization and in- 
 effectiveness in the long run. Temporary equilibrium may be 
 attained in some cases by balancing the selfish interest of one 
 person against that of another, but permanent stability is not 
 attained in this way. Have we not learned the lesson that 
 the massing of individual self-interest into a group selfishness is 
 the way of class struggles within a nation, and of wars without ? 
 Massed selfishness tends thus to be anarchic, and to pull itself 
 down in the ruin of its competitors. But love builds and de- 
 stroys not. Unwise love may destroy, but it is the unwisdom, 
 not the love, that is responsible. What the friends of democ- 
 racy have to do is to put administrative experience and scientific 
 analysis into the service of the brotherly purpose, and to train 
 children in the resulting concepts and methods as well as in the 
 love motive. 
 
 The psychological approach to children's faults. What 
 has just been said as to the extent and the firmness of the lodge- 
 
SIN 169 
 
 ment of sin awakens echoes of the old controversy over total 
 depravity. Echoes only; for our problem is different, and our 
 approach to facts is different. BeHef in total depravity was a 
 dogmatic belief, that is, one accepted upon authority that was 
 supposed to be that of divine revelation. The procedure was 
 a priori, the conclusion being first accepted, and facts then being 
 used merely to illustrate and confirm it. Illustration and con- 
 firmation, too, consisted, not in analyzing children's conduct, 
 or in tracing it to its causes, but in contrasting it with a fixed 
 standard of adult or even divine perfection, and then taking all 
 deviation from the standard en bloc as defect of child nature. 
 Even though less deviation had been found, or none at all, 
 the doctrine would have stood nevertheless. 
 
 The whole landscape is changed as soon as we go at the 
 facts in the spirit of science. We recognize in children multi- 
 tudes of reactions that are social in the same sense in which 
 some of our maturest Christian conduct is social. We perceive 
 other reactions that are anti-social in the same sense in which 
 some of our mature badness is anti-social. But we perceive 
 also that neither sort of reaction has as yet the woody fibre of 
 adult character. Moreover, we see that children's ways are not 
 simple, as the theory of depravity makes them out to be. We 
 do not have just "good children'' and "bad children" to deal 
 with, but personalities already complex because of the influence 
 of preceding experiences as well as because of the variety of the 
 instincts that are always at work. If we are to understand these 
 personalities, we must analyze their conduct into its elements; 
 we must see the relations of these elements to one another and 
 to the particular stimulus that awakens each of them on each 
 occasion; and in all this we must persistently trace each specific 
 item to an equally specific cause. The following questions, 
 which may appropriately be raised when faulty conduct, or con- 
 duct that seems to be faulty, occur, will illustrate this psycho- 
 logical approach. 
 
 How much in the conduct that is regarded as faulty is a result 
 of physiological conditions such as imperfect nutrition, digestive 
 disturbances, adenoids and mouth-breathing or other diseased 
 
170 SIN 
 
 conditions that lower the vitality, defective sense-organs, and 
 nervous instability produced by fatigue, lack of sleep, over- 
 stimulation, or other causes ? 
 
 How much of the faulty conduct is an imitative reproduction 
 of the conduct of others, whether children or adults ? How much 
 of it constitutes an attempt to adjust oneself, protectively for 
 example, to persons who are stronger ? 
 
 How much of it is a matter of habit, and how did this habit 
 arise? Note the distribution of the child's pleasures heretofore. 
 Has he repeatedly experienced pleasure in acts of this kind, and 
 if so could his elders have controlled conditions so as to deprive 
 such acts of their pleasurable quality? What satisfactions have 
 been provided for conduct of opposite social quality? In short, 
 have his elders arranged conditions heretofore so that social acts 
 on his part have regularly brought satisfaction, and anti-social acts 
 discomfort ? 
 
 What is the situation that called out this particular unsocial 
 act ? Our reactions do not occur in a vacuum, but in response to 
 specific incitement. What are the specific elements in the situa- 
 tion that the child was reacting to, and in particular what was 
 each of these elements to him at the time? Do not define the 
 situation merely as it looks to an adult; do not define it in merely 
 general terms, but make sure how the particular features of it 
 looked to this child at this time.^ 
 
 What are the instinctive roots of the reaction? Avoid for the 
 time being all such blanket or cover-up terms as badness, naughty 
 child, selfishness, wilfulness, obstinacy, disobedience, heedless- 
 ness, untruthfulness, cruelty, and guilt and innocence. Find what 
 specific impulses were in play at the moment and immediately 
 before it, and see how each responds to some particular incitement 
 in the situation. 
 
 » A child of six was told by his mother to perform a certain small service 
 that would take him temporarily from, the room. He started to comply, 
 but paused inside the room, and he remained unmoved even by the second 
 command. A third command brought this rejoinder: "But, mother, I 
 shall miss the story !" For at the moment he was a member of a conversa- 
 tional group in which a story was just then in progress. The mother, promptly 
 perceiving that she, rather than the boy, had strained the mother-child re- 
 lation, gave permission to remain to the end of the story, whereupon the 
 child cheerfully performed his duty. What would have been the educa- 
 tional effect if the mother had insisted upon instant compliance regardless 
 of the elements in the situation to which the child was at the moment respond- 
 ing? How can we expect to make children social minded by insisting that 
 we are right when in fact we are blundering? 
 
SIN 171 
 
 It will then at last be time to ask which of these impulses, 
 if any at all, needs to be suppressed. We shall often find that the 
 chief difficulty is in an immature application of an instinct that 
 has permanent value. 
 
 Analysis like this usually discovers that the chief factor in 
 the faulty conduct is some physiological condition or else some 
 previous and continued failure of the child's elders to provide 
 conditions favorable for the growth of social habits and of 
 social intelligence. Even the nervous causes of children's 
 unsocial conduct are most often a product of adult neglect. 
 The "depravity" that the child exhibits, therefore, is com- 
 monly not that of his own heart, but that of remediable faults 
 of adult individuals and of adult society. 
 
 Educational guidance of self-approval and self-condem- 
 nation. Though the causes of a child's misconduct be thus 
 traced to us his elders, the misconduct is nevertheless his ow^n, 
 and he needs emancipation from it. His act is bound to leave 
 some deposit in the self that he is now forming. The educa- 
 tor's task is to see that childish faults, w^hatever their cause, 
 are so handled as to leave a socially constructive deposit. The 
 fact that a child is not "really bad" does not imply that he 
 should be let alone. In some instances, doubtless, the best 
 thing that can happen is that his misconduct should be mini- 
 mized and forgotten, especially misconduct that involves no 
 immediate danger to others, and misconduct that is not in 
 serious danger of becoming habitual. But in the by-and-large 
 some realization on the part of the child himself that something 
 is wrong, and that it must be corrected, is most important both 
 for constructive social habits and for constructive social think- 
 ing. If a child who is already able to communicate by language 
 is merely wheedled or coddled into being amiable, the best 
 that can result is a blind habit, probably a habit of waiting for 
 the wdieedling or the coddling, whereas he needs to grow in self- 
 reliance, in self-guidance, and therefore in discriminative judg- 
 ment upon his own conduct. This implies that: 
 
 (1) Things to he done and things to he avoided must he defined 
 in the child's own mind with sufficient clearness to enable him to 
 
172 SIN 
 
 know whether or not he has acted correctly. This means that 
 there must be rules, but it does not imply that rules are to be 
 imposed by authority that to the child must seem arbitrary. 
 In some matters, especially those that concern health and physi- 
 cal safety, rules must be enforced whether the child understands 
 the necessity of them or not. But every effort should be made 
 to have every requirement, as far as possible, a mutual under- 
 standing between the child and his elders. Moreover, rules 
 must not be so difficult as to discourage efforts to obey. Rather, 
 rules should be made so easy that the child will have the joy of 
 meeting the standard and of triumphing over his own weakness. 
 To children, as to adults, the consciousness that one knows 
 just what is expected, and just how to meet the expectation, 
 gives a sense of power.^ 
 
 (2) The child must he made aware that other 'persons, if possible 
 both children and adults, approve acts of his that comply ivith the 
 standard, and disapprove acts of his that violate it. Every child 
 is entitled to such social support and correction for his judg- 
 ments upon himself. Social approval and disapproval hold 
 his attention to the point, enable him to look farther ahead, 
 and to some extent help to keep the mind objective and to 
 counteract self-sophistication and self-importance. The power 
 that others thus have over us by strictly psychological means 
 is elemental. Our response to the approvals and disapprovals 
 of others is instinctive and emotional. Here is natural educa- 
 tion, the power of which is little less than marvellous. Chil- 
 dren as young as four years who persist in passionate attacks 
 upon playmates in spite of repeated physical chastisement by 
 parents have been known to struggle for self-control and to 
 achieve it as soon as their playmates unitedly expressed their 
 attitude by withdrawing from the passionate children's so- 
 ciety. 
 
 Here lie the instinctive roots of the sense of guilt, and in 
 general of what is popularly called conscience. Whatever 
 
 1 "How do you do, M.?" said some neighbors to a very small boy who 
 was playing in the front yard. He answered: "Pretty well, thank you," and 
 instantly ran into the house to ask his mother whether he had made the cor- 
 rect reply. 
 
SIN 173 
 
 sensitiveness we attain toward abstract right, or duty, or ideals, 
 or God, takes its rise in sensitiveness toward the approvals and 
 disapprovals of human beings. The range of this influence 
 has no natural limits. The most exalted sense of obligation 
 is psychologically continuous with the inner impulsion that 
 makes us conform to social expectation in such trivial matters 
 as the style of our shoes; and the self-approval of a good con- 
 science is similarly related to the puffing up of ourselves when we 
 learn that one of our thousand ancestors ten generations back 
 was distinguished for something or other ! Obviously a power 
 like this needs to be used by the educator with discrimination. 
 Both the objects that are to receive social approval and dis- 
 approval, and the emotional intensity of the experience of 
 social opinion must be regulated. Hence: 
 
 (3) These approvals and disapprovals must he so expressed 
 that the attention of the child is kept upon the grounds thereof , 
 that is, the thing that is good or bad, arid why it is so. What he 
 needs is to form a like opinion, or to see some fact in a new light, 
 yes, even to desire something that he did not desire before. 
 If, when he is condemned, he fixes his mind upon the disapprov- 
 ing persons, he may resent their attitude because it hurts him. 
 He then condemns their condemnation instead of condemning 
 the act that they disapprove. He may even stiffen himself 
 in his misconduct by associating his discomfort with the dis- 
 approval instead of with his own fault. Moreover, the emo- 
 tional effect of condemnation, especially if it is not tempered 
 to the child's individual sensitiveness, may easily be depres- 
 sion and discouragement, paralysis of action, the withering of 
 initiative. Here, again, the persons who condemn get them- 
 selves between the child and his proper goal. 
 
 When he meets approval, as well as when he meets dis- 
 approval, something depends upon the direction of his atten- 
 tion. If he does not think of the grounds of the approval, but 
 rather forms a mental association between his own enjoyment 
 and the approvers, he will indeed be drawn to them in a sort of 
 fellowship, but the attachment will be that of the clique, not 
 that of a generous sociality. Cliquism consists essentially in 
 
174 SIN 
 
 admiration for persons without discriminating what is admi- 
 rable or otherwise in them. If discrimination were practised, 
 the traits that are really likable in the members of the clique 
 would be found outside as well as inside it, and unlikable traits 
 would be found inside. 
 
 The sum of the matter is that the educational effect that 
 is to be sought from social approvals and disapprovals, whether 
 from other children or from adults, should not be the strength- 
 ening of purposeless social likes and dislikes, but increase in the 
 child's intelligent co-operation with other children and with 
 adults for specific objective ends. 
 
 (4) Condemnation must not he administered so often or made so 
 emphatic, and approval must not he so rare, that the child hecomes 
 convinced that he is really and rootedly had, and accepts himself 
 as such, or concludes that misconduct is not a serious thing after all. 
 The approvals and disapprovals should be of such a kind, and 
 so distributed, as to awaken in him a discriminating judgment 
 upon the tendencies of his conduct, a realization that there is 
 something for him to struggle for, and a hopeful attitude in 
 the struggle. Joy is the handmaid of vigor; depression con- 
 spires with weakness. If frequent repetition of condemnation 
 does not bring depression, it brings nevertheless another evil. 
 As the skin defends itself from undue pressure by becoming 
 thick and callous, so constant fault-finding renders the mind 
 insensitive to its faults. The child must be trained to notice 
 differences; therefore his elders must do so. They must ex- 
 press their appreciation of even feeble efforts toward improve- 
 ment, and they must so habitually show their confidence in 
 him that his habitual notion of himself will be that of improve- 
 ment. This policy fits the spontaneous interests of children. 
 They know that they are children; they aspire to grow; they 
 know that they are faulty; they like change; they are proud to 
 become stronger both mentally and physically, and they are 
 quite capable of the joy of self-conquest. What a pity that our 
 own insensitiveness to the child's capacities for changing him- 
 self should create conditions that dull these capacities instead 
 of using them. 
 
SIN 175 
 
 (5) In order to educate for democracy, there must he free reciproc- 
 ity of approvals and disapprovals between children and their elders. 
 We cannot make democrats of children by treating their judg- 
 ments as of no account. Merely beating down another will, or 
 flattening it down by constant pressure, whether the will of a 
 nation, or of a man, or of a child, is the mark of an autocracy 
 that is bent upon perpetuating itself. A child does not increase 
 in virtue by absolute submission to anybody or anything. Not 
 training in such submission, but practice in intelligent, volun- 
 tary co-operation, is the thing that will make democrats of 
 children. 
 
 This principle is violated in self-governing groups of children 
 whenever the public opinion of the group suppresses individual 
 judgment, or leaves no scope for making it effective. The prin- 
 ciple is violated by adults whenever, in their relations with a 
 child, they assume to be infallibly right. The assumption is 
 grotesquely untrue anyw'ay; it is always untrue; the wisest 
 parent or teacher is wise only in spots, and no one is competent 
 to locate wuth precision the boundaries between his own com- 
 petence and his own incompetence. 
 
 Even when the judgment of an adult is precisely right, it 
 should not be merely imposed upon a child. The way to make 
 the child a democrat is to make him a convinced and therefore 
 free participant in true judgments. Children must be encour- 
 aged, then, to weigh what the educator says and does. Amend- 
 ments proposed by children are always in order; that is, the 
 educator must be sincerely willing (not merely make a pretense 
 of being willing) to reconsider and modify his own plans. The 
 formation of a genuinely common will by deliberation — this is 
 the problem of democracy not only in election campaigns and 
 in the halls of legislation, but also in every schoolhouse, in 
 every home, and in every church school. 
 
 This will involve children's approval and condemnation 
 not only of what we invite then* judgment upon, but also of 
 what they take it into their heads to have a judgment upon. 
 One of the things in which they will take the keenest interest 
 is our own personal conduct. Here, as well as in child life, they 
 
176 SIN 
 
 will find objective material in which they can discover and de- 
 fine moral differences. Here they will find fellowship in their 
 faults as well as in their virtues — that is, if we adults have the 
 truly democratic humility, the high educational wisdom, to 
 let children help us in our moral struggle even as we help them. 
 This is democracy in moral education, and it is moral education 
 toward democracy. 
 
 Socialization by means of punishment. What has been 
 said of social disapproval, which is a kind of punishment, con- 
 tains almost everything that is essential in a general theory 
 of punishment except certain warnings as to what it is not. In 
 the strict and proper sense of the word, to punish is to express 
 disapproval by means more emphatic and generally more pain- 
 ful (though not always so) than words. The disapproval, the 
 personal relationship, is of the essence of it. Punishment, then, 
 is the use of pain as a means of improving the child's social 
 attitudes. The test of it in any instance is the contribution 
 that it makes to the formation of a genuinely common will of 
 the deliberative type. If it puts persons farther apart instead 
 of bringing them closer to one another, it not only fails to be 
 socially educative, it becomes anti-social education. 
 
 Much that is called disciplinary punishment is condemned at 
 once by this test. Here belong: 
 
 Punishing in anger or as a means of relieving one's own irrita- 
 tion. 
 
 Punishing to even up things, under the barbarous theory of 
 retaliation — if you hurt us, we will hurt you. A refined form of 
 this theory holds that abstract justice requires that -WTong be ex- 
 piated by pain, and that right be rewarded by happiness. Here 
 the presupposition is that each individual will act upon purely in- 
 dividualistic motives. Such punishment tends to intensify such 
 motives. It separates the punished from the punisher instead 
 of uniting them. 
 
 Punishment that compels to the performance or the avoidance 
 of a particular act without regard to the relations between per- 
 sons that are involved in the whole matter. When the punisher 
 steps into the situation he makes the personal factor prominent. 
 
SIN 177 
 
 whether he intends to do so or not. He may imagine that he is 
 merely adjusting the child to the proper use of material things, 
 or to playmates, whereas he is also changing the relation of the 
 child to himself and to other adults. Unless this change in per- 
 sonal relations is a wholesome one, the punislmient is to be con- 
 demned. 
 
 In view of these strictures one may well ask whether, then, 
 any punishment can be socially constructive. Must not the 
 deliberate infliction of pain inevitably separate persons even 
 though it secures the performance or the avoidance of a par- 
 ticular act? The disciplinarian, whether parent or teacher, 
 should not flinch at this point. The cement that binds individ- 
 uals into society is ultimately the satisfactions that they have 
 in one another's presence. Something to be enjoyed in common 
 is the genuinely constructive factor, and the only one, in any 
 part of social education. All that the infliction of pain can 
 possibly do is to clear the way for increased social enjoyment. 
 Here, then, is the proper test and control of all punishments. 
 Under some conditions pain deliberately inflicted can, as experi- 
 ence shows, heal a child's mind of one or another social defect 
 just as truly as the painful process of filling a tooth may stop 
 toothache. Let us note some of these conditions : 
 
 When a child is carried away by some excitement of the moment 
 so that he is unable to use his judgment, as when hilarious play 
 becomes dangerous or cruel, a moderate pain inflicted in good 
 nature may break the spell, "clear the air," and restore him to 
 himself, a self that he actually approves and prefers. 
 
 Young children often produce pain in others wdthout quite 
 realizing the fact. Inflicting some similar, but harmless, pain, 
 with appropriate explanation, may be the most effective cure.* 
 
 What is past and gone cannot be corrected; it can only be used 
 to secure some future good. The reason for punishment is not 
 past misconduct or present perversity of will, but the happier 
 
 »A small boy had bitten his still smaller sister. "Come here," said the 
 mother, "I want to show you just how you have made sister feel." There- 
 upon the mother's teeth, applied firmly and painfully to the lobe of an ear 
 illuminated the small boy's social thinking and strengthened his social motive 
 toward his sister without separating him from his mother's love. 
 
178 SIN 
 
 future that punishment may bring nearer. The amount of pain, 
 and the method of administering it, must be determined with a 
 view to turning the child's attention toward this better future. 
 Pain that draws attention to itself only can hardly promote self- 
 control or social self-guidance. The consequence of this remark 
 with respect to the severity of the infliction is obvious enough. 
 Not to stop reflection, but to help it, is the proper purpose; not 
 to compel or crush, but to assist toward the realized freedom of 
 self-control. In short, punishment is good when it actually guides 
 the child's attention toward a possible good, the desirability of 
 which he himself sees. If at the moment of the smart he cannot 
 see, the smart must be preceded and followed by deliberative 
 processes that assist him to do so. Many a child has found, and 
 promptly, the sweetness of clarified insight and improved self- 
 control produced by an attention-arresting pain accompanied 
 by calm and friendly discussion of its purpose. 
 
 But increased pleasures of a social sort, that is, shared pleasures, 
 must be provided by the very hand that inflicts the pain. It is 
 a terrible thing for a child to think habitually of any human being 
 as a pain-bringer. Not fear, but love is what does all the con- 
 structive work. The punisher and the punished must have so 
 many pleasures that they share with each other that the child 
 himself will realize that the pain is only an incident of an unbroken 
 fellowship. 
 
 As soon as we reach this point we see that we must go one step 
 further if punishment is to be socially constructive in the highest 
 measure. As the ordinary relation of the punisher to the punished 
 is that of pleasure-sharing, so their relation, when occasion for 
 punishment comes, is that of pain-sharing, and this must be real- 
 ized by both. The only way by which the punisher can avoid 
 separating himself from the child is to cause the child to know that 
 the two suffer together. The punisher is not to triumph over the 
 child, is not to be happy while the child is in woe, but to main- 
 tain at-one-ment alike in pleasures and in pains. 
 
 Turning-points in character. We have seen in preceding 
 chapters why the educator should aim at continuous moral 
 growth rather than rely upon any breaks provided by original 
 nature. In the present chapter we have dealt with another 
 sort of continuity, for again and again we have come upon the 
 
SIN 179 
 
 fact that the conduct of the young is bound up, in a remarkably 
 close way, with that of their elders. But neither sort of con- 
 tinuity implies either that moral growth can be equally rapid 
 at all times, or that all parts of the complex moral experience 
 can grow at the same rate, or that it can be free from crises, 
 that is, such collocations of internal and external conditions 
 that the child's particular reaction at this time gives a perma- 
 nent direction to future conduct, or in other words a "set" to 
 character. As a matter of fact, all these kinds of unevenness 
 occur. At one time we find acceleration of moral intelligence 
 and of social motives, at another time slowing down; interest 
 now in this phase of conduct, now in that; the costliest errors 
 at critical points, and also decisive and permanent victories 
 for right character. Let us consider the educational significance 
 of the most marked of these deviations, the crises. 
 
 The turning-points that one can remember as one's own are 
 almost exclusively those of adolescence or of maturity. Con- 
 sequently we form a habit of thinking of crises of character in 
 terms of issues defined at the time and involving decisions of 
 greater or less deliberateness. But a set toward or away from 
 a particular human relationship, or a particular mode of reac- 
 tion, may be established whenever an overwhelming emotion 
 occurs in connection with it. Shocks occur in childhood that 
 produce permanent timidities of one sort or another, with their 
 paralysis of action and of initiative. Set revulsions or attrac- 
 tions toward individuals, or set attitudes toward the opposite 
 sex, are also started now and then in childhood. Moreover, 
 the ground tone of one's subsequent social existence may be 
 determined by early experiences that awaken trust or distrust. 
 Thus we come up from childhood sometimes with permanent 
 scars upon the mind, sometimes with a permanent outreaching 
 impulse toward some social good, neither of which we recognize 
 the source of. With respect to these things the wisdom of the 
 educator will consist not only in providing abundance of whole- 
 some social relationships, but also in the habit of noting chil- 
 dren's emotions, and of preventing children from being isolated 
 and merely self-involved upon the occasion of any overwhelm- 
 
180 SIN 
 
 ing experience. The sharing of one's emotions with a sym- 
 pathetic, steady, and social minded friend is the sm-est road 
 to balance. Moreover, if the passing of the years reveals the 
 presence of an unfortunate set, again the task is to induce the 
 victim to share this particular side of his nature and experience 
 with such a friend, to share memories, hopes, fears, victories, 
 and defeats.^ 
 
 That adolescence has a peculiar relation to the establish- 
 ment of the final set of character is evident from a variety of 
 facts. The general psychophysical condition renders the forma- 
 tion and reorganization of habits relatively easy for a few years, 
 after which there comes the relative non-plasticity of maturity, 
 and its absorption in the compelling grind of existence. In 
 this period the new capacity for affection makes possible fresh 
 and profounder ethical appreciation. The general maturing 
 of self-dependence opens the way for a final commitment of 
 one's purposes to some life principle or ideal. Hence the 
 tribal custom of adolescent initiation; the custom, in various 
 denominations, of confirming children just as adolescent inter- 
 ests begin to be pronounced; the great relative frequency of 
 adolescent conversions in denominations that cultivate this 
 experience, and the frequency with which a lifelong interest or 
 ambition takes its rise in this period. On the other hand, the 
 significance of adolescence for character is equally clear from 
 the great number of criminal careers that have their rise here, 
 and from the vastly greater number of persons who are pur- 
 sued through life by vicious habits, such as alcoholism and 
 licentiousness, that are formed at this time. 
 
 1 "We are here at the edge of the morbidities that require psychotherapy. 
 We should find, if it were possible to go into them in this work, that social 
 education and psychotherapy are at many points continuous with each other. 
 Two points in particular may be mentioned. Less rehance is placed than 
 formerly upon the corrective power of mere suggestion, and more upon a re- 
 education of the will in which the patient deUberately co-operates with the 
 suggestions of the physician. Here habit formation assisted by the social 
 support of the physician is the essence of the healing. The other point con- 
 cerns the value of bringing one's secrets to the Ught and sharing them with 
 another. Psychoanalysis has many aspects and angles that cannot here 
 be mentioned. But its relation to social education appears in its method 
 of estabhshing normal attitudes toward society at large by first securing 
 complete co-oper9,tion between physician and patient. 
 
SIN 181 
 
 When, alongside these considerations the recapitulation theory 
 placed its doctrine of the natural and necessary egoism of child- 
 hood, the inference was drawn in certain circles that conver- 
 sion in the sense of a reversal of character, or in the sense of the 
 beginning of genuinely personal religion, is a standard religious 
 experience for adolescents. We have already seen, however, 
 how the theory tliat childhood is doomed to egoism, and that 
 adolescence is spontaneously altruistic, overlooks, oversimpli- 
 fies, and distorts facts. A policy of religious education that 
 postpones the beginning of personal religion of a social sort till 
 adolescence, relying upon the chance that a conversion experi- 
 ence will reverse the set that childhood has given to the char- 
 acter, is a fatal policy. It has not v/orked in practice. For 
 parallel with the stream of adolescent conversions are two other 
 streams that issue from the Sunday schools, a stream of youths 
 who come into full church-membership without a conversion, 
 and a stream of those who go on into mature life without tak- 
 ing any religious stand at all. The constant aim of elementary 
 religious education should be to make conversion unnecessary.^ 
 
 Nevertheless, the peculiar plasticity of adolescence does 
 make it the scene of many a decisive experience. It contains 
 the main turning-point of many a character. Social educa- 
 tion has here a distinctive work to do. On the positive side it 
 is threefold: To meet the spontaneously enlarging social crav- 
 ing by providing wholesome social experience both with one's 
 own sex and with the opposite sex; to guide this experience 
 toward intelligent ideals of marriage and of the larger society, 
 the democracy of God; and to train the individual specifically 
 for the attainment of his "majority," the assumption of full 
 and independent citizenship, and entrance upon a life occupa- 
 tion. 
 
 On the other hand, here is opportunity, such as will never 
 
 1 One of the evils that result from assuming that an adolescent conversion 
 is normal is weakening and confusion in the term "conversion." It should 
 not be used for any and every sign of reUgious interest, but only in the New 
 Testament sense of a reversal, "about face," in the principle or policy of 
 one's life. 
 
 I have discussed the psychology of adolescent conversions at considerable 
 length in chap. X of The Psychology of Religion. 
 
182 SIN 
 
 recur, for correcting unsocial sets that the personality may have 
 acquired. These sets are of many kinds. In one case a par- 
 ticular an ti-sociar habit has] to be conquered; in another case 
 there is needed an awakening from indifference, or from mere 
 drifting with a social current; or the thrall of an unwholesome 
 social connection may have to be broken; or an already or- 
 ganized self-centredness may have to be undone; or one may 
 have the problem of consecration to a particular life work. 
 In this list we have youths who require conversion in the strict 
 sense of the word, but we have also cases of a milder sort to 
 which the term conversion cannot be applied without confusion. 
 But in all these cases alike educational methods are required — 
 the making and the breaking of habits, the practice of co- 
 operation, the enlargement of ideals, the culture of worship, 
 the increasing control of conduct by knowledge. That is, 
 even turning-points in character that involve a profound re- 
 versal are to be included under the notion of religious education, 
 and they are therefore to be planned for, controlled, and tested, 
 by educational standards. 
 
 Considerable unsteadiness and confusion exist at this point. 
 Many persons persist in thinking of education as identical 
 with instruction — persist in it to the point of perversity. Even 
 some who know that education has to do with the forming of a 
 will, do not clearly see how much it involves besides habit 
 formation. The most fundamental thing in education is its 
 constant reconstruction of purposes. Christian education, 
 when it Is really social, is through and through an Incoming of 
 the higher life, a renewing of the mind, a laying aside of lower 
 selves. If, then, one of our pupils has already formed such 
 perverse purposes that his present need is conversion, we are 
 still to proceed as educators. We should never turn an adoles- 
 cent over to uneducational evangelism. 
 
 Evangelism is uneducational to the extent that it is char- 
 acterized by any of these things : Separating the act of surrender 
 to God from devotion to men; inducing a decision so general 
 or so indeterminate in its content as to separate it from the 
 specific decisions involved in the previous and the subsequent 
 
SIN 183 
 
 education of the youth ; awakening aspiration without providing 
 immediate outlet for it in social living; separating conversion 
 from habit formation on the one side and from intelligent 
 analysis on the other; occasionalism, or postponing specific 
 dealing with the adolescent's purposes to a particular occasion, 
 and then crowding this occasion with appeals so that mental 
 assimilation is impossible; finally, such use of suggestion and 
 of emotional incitements as prevents rather than promotes the 
 self-controlled organization of purposes. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE LEARNING PROCESS CONSIDERED AS 
 THE ACHIEVING OF CHARACTER 
 
 Various senses of "moral character." In the present 
 chapter certain questions that are fundamental to the problem 
 of method in social education will be opened, particularly ques- 
 tions that have to do with the pupil's awareness of social issues, 
 and with his self -consciousness as related thereto. What are 
 the effects, on the one hand, of shielding a child from knowledge 
 of the issues that we are training him to meet, and on the other 
 hand of letting him know what he is moving toward ? What is 
 the educational value of moral self-consciousness as compared 
 with unreflective adjustment to social situations? How shall 
 we conceive social character in individual terms, and what 
 sort of individual consciousness is involved in the achieving 
 of such character ? In order to clear the ground for these ques- 
 tions, it is necessary to note that each of the main terms in- 
 volved — character, learning process, and self-consciousness — 
 has several senses. Let us begin with the concept of moral 
 character. 
 
 To have a good character means, of course, to be steady 
 rather than merely impulsive in one's conduct, and to pursue 
 lines of conduct that have, or are worthy to have, social approval. 
 But both the steadiness and the worthiness may be of different 
 kinds. Good character may mean, and actually does mean, 
 any one or more of the following things : (1) Negative goodness, 
 or abstaining from acts that are forbidden by the code that is 
 acknowledged by the society in which one moves, whether this 
 society be a club, a church, one's profession, or the world of 
 business. (2) Conventional goodness, or habitually doing the 
 
 184 
 
ACHIEVING CHARACTER 185 
 
 acts that are positively prescribed in such a code. (3) The 
 inner deternmiation that involves self-discipHne in addition to 
 habit. This keeps one ' true to standards in difficult situa- 
 tions. (4) Steady devotion to a cause or social ideal that outruns 
 the conventional social code, and perhaps requires that it be revised. 
 
 If we are to establish the democracy of God, we must, it is 
 obvious, cultivate character in the fourth sense. Just at this 
 point religious education finds its peculiar function and its 
 peculiar difficulties in respect of method. Society as it now 
 exists is quite willing to support an educational policy that 
 makes for negative goodness and for conventional goodness; 
 society would go as far, if it knew how, as to produce in its 
 children the "rock-ribbed" fidelity to principle that constitutes 
 character in the third sense. Up to this point religious educa- 
 tion includes, or fuses with, whatever there is in "generaF* 
 education that effectively socializes children. But beyond 
 this point there lie, not the highways of social conformity, but 
 the mountain trails of social reconstruction. Not the will 
 that is conformed even to what is good in conventional social 
 standards, but the will that is transformed into the likeness of 
 the divine democracy that is far beyond and far above, is the 
 character that Christian education has to produce. 
 
 From many points in the valley of conventionality men are 
 blazing trails up the steeps of social idealism. The love of man- 
 kind, confidence that human nature contains high possibilities, 
 the gleam of a universal justice that may yet be — these are 
 alluring many men of many minds toward the heights. With 
 these men religious education that is based upon the ideal of 
 a democracy of God has a special affinity. We may agree 
 or not with this or that program of social reform; we must 
 doubtless make many experiments before we shall secure con- 
 trol of essential conditions of democracy, and some of these 
 experiments will fail; but through all the give-and-take of 
 debate upon social programs, and through all the practical 
 measures that succeed or fail, religious education will have the 
 distinctive task of producing men whose motives steadily and 
 uncompromisingly reflect the will of the Father that we should 
 
186 ACHIEVING CHARACTER 
 
 make ourselves brothers. The democratizing of the heart is 
 the fundamental and the most difficult part in creating effective 
 democratic institutions. Democratic character will be formed, 
 of course, only by participation in specific purposes of democratic 
 quality, and it will go on to require democratic institutions for 
 the fulfilment of itself. No esoteric goodness will suffice. 
 But our specific mission will be to put sufficient heart, and a 
 sufficiently radical character, into this work, even the heart 
 and character of God. 
 
 Various senses of "to learn." To learn means either 
 (1) To form a habit; or (2) To acquire information; or (3) To 
 attain skill in a particular operation or occupation; or (4) To 
 become wise. No one can mistake the fact that we have to 
 learn wisdom, or the further fact that learning to be wise, 
 though it depends upon and includes the three other sorts of 
 learning, is not quite the same as either of them or as all of 
 them together. Becoming wise implies acquiring better desires, 
 reconstructing one's purposes, self-conquest, and placing one- 
 self effectively within some foresighted scheme of society 
 that awakens social approval. Wisdom is more than intelli- 
 gence; more than craftiness, however successful. It is more 
 than good habits, which reproduce good life but do not trans- 
 form the good into the better. It is more than skill, for one 
 can be skilful in getting what one wants, and yet be unwise 
 in wanting it. Social education, then, must somehow, at some 
 time, or perhaps through all periods of the child's growth, in- 
 duct him into this individual relation to ideals. It must in- 
 spire in him an original foregrasping of social good, even the 
 faith by which alone we can be saved to our highest possibilities. 
 
 Various senses of "moral self-consciousness." Everybody 
 is familiar with, and everybody who reflects disapproves, the 
 following forms of moral self-consciousness in children and 
 youth as well as in adults: (1) Moral priggery, or habitually 
 thinking about one's own goodness, habitually bringing it to 
 the attention of others, and conforming to standards for this 
 self-centred reason. (2) Moral snobbery, or looking down 
 upon others because of their supposed moral inferiority. (3) 
 
ACHIEVING CHARACTER 187 
 
 Moral hypersensitiveness, which shows itself in scruples, hesi- 
 tations, and doubts when action is required; in self-condemna- 
 tion so intense or so prolonged as to interfere with moral vigor; 
 in longings for an abstract and contentless perfection; or in 
 failure to co-operate in practical affairs because of the imper- 
 fections that inhere in all social adjustments (which is, prac- 
 tically, insistence that others should always adjust themselves 
 to me). 
 
 In contrast to all this, we admire a child who does his duty as 
 a matter of course; doesn't cry too much over spilled milk, 
 but goes ahead, endeavoring to do better next time; and 
 doesn't bother his head about the degree of his virtuousness. 
 This is sometimes called moral unconsciousness, which is then 
 contrasted with moral self-consciousness. No one will ques- 
 tion the justice of this judgment, but the grounds for it are not 
 always clearly seen. 
 
 What is the precise nature of the evil in the moral self- 
 consciousness that has just been described? It is that the 
 child obscures the moral goal by looking at his moral self. Just 
 as a golfer is required, in the act of driving, to fix his attention 
 upon the ball and not upon his club, so moral conduct is in 
 general most effective when one's attention is upon what is to 
 be accomplished, and not upon one's faults and virtues. It is 
 this objectivity of mind that we praise in one child and deplore 
 the absence of in another. We praise objectivity of mind 
 because it is a condition of objective efficiency. Moral self- 
 consciousness in the sense thus far defined connotes in the end 
 moral clumsiness, actual defects in objective social relations. 
 
 But a distinction has to be made, and the possibility of an- 
 other sort of moral self -consciousness has to be considered. 
 Does the misfortune of the children whom we have in mind 
 lie in the fact that they judge themselves to be good or bad? 
 Hardly, for the so-called morally unconscious child, too, is by 
 no means unaware of his proper classification. If my fellows 
 approve me, especially if I am approved by those who are 
 older and wiser than I, how can I help approving myself ? The 
 trouble lies partly in misjudging oneself, and partly in failure 
 
188 ACHIEVING CHARACTER 
 
 to organize one's judgments of oneself into a social scheme. To 
 be good, to achieve a moral status, Is not a moral finality. 
 I am a good boy, or a good man, am I ? Or perhaps a bad one ? 
 Well, what of It? What difference does It make? That Is, 
 what persons are affected by it, and how are they affected? 
 How is the social world In which I move either better off or 
 worse off because I am what I am? When I thus make my 
 judgment upon myself a part of a more general judgment 
 upon social welfare, social justice, or the progress of world so- 
 ciety, my self-consciousness is healthily objective. The self- 
 consciousness that stops short of this objectivity becomes 
 self -Involution, and "foozles the ball.'' 
 
 Self-Involution Is, In fact, a better name than self-conscious- 
 ness for that which Is common to moral priggery, moral snob- 
 bery, and moral hypersensltiveness. Self -consciousness, in 
 the stricter and more proper sense of the term. Is present when- 
 ever what is actually desired is distinguished from something 
 else as an alternative or contrary object of desire. That Is, 
 self -consciousness Is inseparable from the facing of any live Issue, 
 in other words, one that Involves mutually exclusive or mutually 
 limiting satisfactions. This statement is not Intended as a 
 general definition of self-consciousness in distinction from any 
 other sort of consciousness, but only as an indication of the 
 route that Is taken In the progress of a mind from instinctive 
 reactions toward those that are required by membership In a 
 deliberative group. 
 
 Moral self-consciousness and deliberative group conscious- 
 ness are correlative — they are two aspects of the same experi- 
 ence. There can be no deliberative group the members of which 
 are non-deliberative. The weighing of alternatives takes place 
 within each individual, who then compares his scales and his 
 results with those of other members. Thus each has to be 
 aware both of himself as this particular self and of others as 
 those particular selves, each self being charsLcterized by the 
 alternative that It cleaves to. Self -consciousness is thus an 
 essential factor in the evolution of society. Social education, 
 accordingly, must bring children to moral self -consciousness. 
 
ACHIEVING CHARACTER 189 
 
 Neither instinct, nor any mere drifting Into social habits, is 
 sufficient for the life of deliberative society. 
 
 It is true that much, very much, that is socially valuable is 
 acquired by imitation or in response to' verbal suggestion. 
 Moreover, constant social pressure by the massing of pleasures 
 in one direction and of pains in the opposite direction produces 
 a large measure of conformity without deliberation. Such 
 conformity is natural, is economically produced, and is admi- 
 rably "unconscious." It Is an essential part of moral education. 
 But its educational capacity has several limitations: 
 
 First, Even In the fundamental matter of habit formation 
 self-consciousness plays a most Important role. In many 
 spheres habits are most easily formed, and are most accurately 
 adjusted to specific needs, when at the beginning contrasts are 
 noticed, alternatives faced, and the first acts in the series are 
 fully voluntary rather than imitative or otherwise suggestive 
 in origin. This is the way to acquire skill. It Is the best way 
 to acquire various social habits, such as punctuality at school, 
 neatness In this or that work, proper self-control in eating and 
 drinking, and constructive charitableness. 
 
 Second, Imitation and other forms of social suggestion, taken 
 by themselves, transmit the imperfections of society as well as 
 its virtues. 
 
 Third, Imitation and other forms of social suggestion contain 
 within themselves no provision for situations in which society 
 is divided against Itself. Shall one go with the majority or 
 with the minority? "Unconscious tuition," valuable as it is, 
 makes little contribution to a problem like this. Non-conform- 
 ists, stubborn minorities, are vital organs of progressive society. 
 How, then, shall the pupil be trained to deal with them? By 
 the use of suggestion we can make him a partisan, often an active 
 and efficient partisan, of any party with which he has happened 
 to associate during his growing years. But partisanship does 
 not solve the problems of society. A genuine social solution is 
 never merely a resultant of moving bodies that collide. Society, 
 because it is co-operation, can resolve Its strains only by mak- 
 ing individual minds feel both of the opposing interests that 
 
190 ACHIEVING CHARACTER 
 
 cause the strain. When any citizen does this, he becomes so- 
 cially self-conscious. Now, this part of a citizen's duty does 
 not fulfil itself by any fresh impulsive outburst upon the day 
 that one becomes qualified to vote. Nay, it requires long, 
 persistent, preliminary training — training, that is to say, in 
 social self -consciousness. 
 
 But self-consciousness of this kind is the precise opposite of 
 self-involution. Self-involution sets me in the centre of a 
 group every member of which is gazing at me; wholesome moral 
 self-consciousness, on the other hand, consists in so control- 
 ling my eyes that they shall surely see some object other than 
 myself toward which the eyes of my fellows are looking — shall 
 see it because they are looking that way. Selfhood of this type 
 is objective-minded because it is social-minded, because it sees 
 through other eyes as well as its own.^ In the end, then, moral 
 self-consciousness is not so much a preliminary to democracy, 
 or a part of the machinery of democracy, as it is democracy it- 
 self realized in an individual will. 
 
 Ambiguities in the debate upon "direct" versus "indirect" 
 methods in moral education. The conclusion that follows 
 from the last three sections is, in a word, that, though the 
 guidance of instinctive action by deliberate prearrangement of 
 pleasures and pains, and the development of wholesome instinc- 
 tive conduct into habits without premeditation on the part 
 of the child are fundamental essentials in moral education, 
 sound method requires also specific measures for promoting 
 premeditation, the weighing of social standards themselves, 
 and the fully conscious taking of one's position with respect to 
 these standards. If, now, any one asks whether this conclusion 
 supports "direct" methods in moral education, no simple yes 
 or no can be given in reply. For the terms "direct" and "in- 
 direct" have no single or uniform meaning in the writings of 
 those who have debated this question now for several years. A 
 veritable medley of conceptions, some expressed, others im- 
 
 1 Compare what was said in the last chapter about keeping the attention of 
 children upon the grounds of social approval and disapproval rather than 
 upon the approvers and disapprovers. 
 
ACHIEVING CHARACTER 191 
 
 plied, gathers particularly around the " direct methods." Thus, 
 one or another writer thinks that: 
 
 The direct method consists in telling children what is right and 
 what is wrong, or how to act. 
 
 It consists in ethical instruction as distinguished from moral 
 training. 
 
 It consists in setting aside a particular period in the school pro- 
 gram for morals as a subject of instruction. 
 
 It consists in causing children to single out and define the 
 ethical aspect of situations as distinguished from causing children 
 to deal with each situation in its concrete totality. 
 
 It consists in causing children to reason about ethical principles, 
 and trying to make them act from ethical reasons rather than from 
 simple and wholesome impulses. 
 
 It consists in Inducing children to dwell upon their own moral 
 excellences and defects. 
 
 It is an attempt to secure good conduct by exhortation or by 
 emotional pressure. 
 
 It is moralizing, or contemplating goodness by itself, in the 
 absence of any occasion for exercising the kind of goodness that 
 is under contemplation. 
 
 It consists In imposing our moral notions upon children, or in 
 securing good conduct from them by pressure from without as 
 distinguished from action from within In response to a situation 
 that the child himself appreciates. 
 
 On the other hand, the designation "indirect" is given to 
 methods that are variously characterized as follows: 
 
 The use of suggestion, rather than either compulsion or reason- 
 ing, to secure good conduct. 
 
 Rehance upon school organization, classroom management, 
 playground supervision, and the personality of the teacher, as 
 supplying both material and method for moral education. 
 
 Getting moral reactions by means of actual moral situations as 
 distinguished from the Imaginary situations of mere instruction. 
 More fully expressed, moral growth through solving the problems 
 that arise in one's own social experience. 
 
 Discussing moral problems when they arise in the pupil's actual 
 
192 ACHIEVING CHARACTER 
 
 conduct rather than according to a systematic plan — ^that is, 
 ''incidental" moral instruction. 
 
 Training for the larger society by bringing the school curriculum 
 into closer relation therewith, and in general by getting the school 
 out of its social isolation. 
 
 That there is some fundamental difference between these two 
 bundles of conceptions one easily feels. But just what the dif- 
 ference is when it is traced downward to its psychological 
 assumptions, or upward to details of practice, is not always so 
 obvious. In respect to practice, we find ambiguities like this: 
 An argument against direct instruction is coupled with an 
 argument for training the pupil to analyze situations so as to 
 pick out the moral element in them. As an example of correct 
 method an instance is given in which a principal dealt with 
 cheating in school work by explaining to the pupils that they 
 were dishonest, and that cheating is stealing. Where lies the 
 indirectness in this case? The principal went directly at the 
 pupils and at the ethical problem, and he did it analytically, 
 not by suggestion. Some writers treat story-telling as an in- 
 stance of direct method; others classify it as indirect. 
 
 What is needed here is a more strictly psychological ap- 
 proach; that is, we need to ask what happens in the pupil's 
 mind. What are the two things that are to be either directly 
 or indirectly related to each other in the pupil's experience? 
 Himself and his teacher? Or himself and another pupil? Or 
 himself and the larger society of which he is to become an adult 
 member? Or his ideas on the one hand and his acts on the 
 other? And what is it for any of these to be either directly 
 or indirectly related to the other ? It is directness as compared 
 with indirectness in the pupil's own mind that we have to deal 
 with. 
 
 Method in moral education follows the general principles 
 of good teaching. The polemic against "direct" methods in 
 moral instruction and training is at bottom a part of the general 
 campaign for better teaching. The defects of the old practice, 
 whether in the teaching of arithmetic or of morals, have their 
 roots in these assumptions : 
 
ACHIEVING CHARACTER 193 
 
 (1) The intellectualistic assumption with respect to the 
 relation of knowledge to life, namely, that thought first grasps 
 reality and then adjusts life to it. The new education reflects 
 the contrary view, that the adjustment process and the cogni- 
 tive process are not two but one. Jesus intimated that up- 
 reach' , conduct is a condition of knowing the higher things — 
 those who put something divine into their acts are the ones who 
 know the things of God. Just so, modern educational reformers 
 in a long procession have proclaimed that we learn by doing, 
 that experience of the real world is the basis of vital instruction 
 about it, that participation in the elements of industrial processes 
 is essential to education, and that character grows by fulfilling 
 one's functions in some social group. 
 
 (2) The undemocratic assumption that to teach is to im- 
 pose the teacher's thought and will upon the pupil. Here is 
 social bias of the most serious import. It ever seeks to justify 
 itself by considerations drawn from the incapacity of children 
 for self-guidance. But it is ever self-condemned because there 
 is lacking in it any provision for bringing pupils to genuine self- 
 guidance, especially to the union of co-operation and liberty 
 that are essential to popular government. The old type of 
 teaching assumed that the use of authority is simply to control 
 others for any good end; the new type assumes that the use of 
 authority is to bring others to self-control, emancipating them 
 from external controls. The only authority to which the 
 teacher has any right is that which is continuously extinguish- 
 ing itself. 
 
 Accordingly, the reform that is now demanded in school 
 practice insists not only that pupils shall be active rather than 
 passive, but also that they shall act from within, and shall 
 organize their activities through their own reflection. Instruc- 
 tion in the natural and physical sciences, for example, now aims, 
 not merely to transfer a given amount of biology or of physics to 
 the pupil, but to bring him up to perform scientific processes 
 himself, and if possible, to make him an independent investi- 
 gator. Just so, the moral aim of the school requires that the 
 pupils be led, not only to hold correct views of conduct, not only 
 
194 ACHIEVING CHARACTER 
 
 to accept loyally and to act upon the superior wisdom of their 
 elders, but also to perform among themselves, each for himself, 
 here and now, the actual processes of social living under free- 
 dom. 
 
 These processes are not to be mere applications of what the 
 teacher tells or prescribes. The teacher, instead of giving solu- 
 tions, which are then to be merely illustrated by pupil experi- 
 mentation, engages the pupils in a genuine trial-and-error 
 method of learning to live. This is the method by which 
 society as a whole has evolved. Education is able to make the 
 process a short one, abbreviating it into the score or so of years 
 during which the school has the child, by making available the 
 rich social materials that have been deposited by the experi- 
 ence of the race. The art of the teacher consists. In no small 
 measure, in making obvious, at the right moment, the applica- 
 bility of this or that part of the social inheritance to the present 
 purposes of the pupils. In this way waste of time and of effort 
 is reduced, and conformity to social standards is most cer- 
 tainly produced. Conformity, that is, from the heart, because 
 it is self-induced. But by this method conformity is secured 
 through freedom, and it carries with it the training in objective 
 moral criticism that is necessary to social progress through 
 revision of social standards. 
 
 Sound method in moral education, then, will cause children 
 to face, directly and analytically, their relations to one an- 
 other, to their teachers, and to the larger society. It will not 
 build up a structure of moral ideas apart from moral action, 
 nor will it be content, on the other hand, with conduct, however 
 appropriate, that does not grow into reflective self-control and 
 weighing of standards. Just as the best teaching of arithmetic, 
 or of manual processes, or of physics causes the child to realize 
 what he is doing, why he does it, what the results are, and how 
 it can be improved, so in morals it is open-eyed, forward-looking, 
 and in this sense self-conscious, practice that counts most for 
 the formation of a democratic character. 
 
 The relation of ethical thinking to virtuous action. From 
 every point of view the lines of our discussion converge upon the 
 
ACHIEVING CHARACTER 195 
 
 conclusion that the learning process with which moral educa- 
 tion is chiefly concerned is an achieving process — the process of 
 achieving character. But character, not as something static, 
 already accomplished; rather, character conceived as making 
 oneself count for objective ends. Here we find a touchstone 
 for the curriculum aspect of any scheme of moral or religious 
 education. 
 
 What value does this touchstone reveal in curricula that 
 divide and subdivide and arrange lesson material according to 
 a schedule of the virtues Into which good character can be 
 analyzed ? If we ask what a good man is like, we get from such 
 curricula the answer that a good man is truthful. Industrious, 
 persevering, kind, and so on. Therefore the pupil Is made to 
 study in succession the virtues of truthfulness, industry, and 
 all the others. There are curricula that appear actually to 
 assume that if a pupil thinks about industry he will become 
 industrious. But the teaching profession as a whole condemns 
 the implied method on the ground that It separates thought 
 from life, substitutes ethical instruction for character forma- 
 tion, and tends, by reason of its abstractness and its dryness, 
 to create actual dislike for moral standards. If, in order to 
 create like instead of dislike, admiration-awakening examples 
 are used, the objection is made that such separation of ethical 
 emotion from moral action creates a habit of feeling rather than 
 of action, and actually substitutes sentiment for character. 
 
 In order to avoid these pitfalls, suppose that. In connection 
 with the study of each virtue, we provide opportunity for the 
 practice of It. There is going on, in fact, considerable hunting 
 up of things that children can do in the way of, shall we say, 
 practice work in goodness? That this search will uncover some 
 really vital things in the moral reactions of children we need 
 not doubt. But the artificiality of the point of view is at 
 best only alleviated thereby. For any such practice is merely 
 added to life. What is added to life can be subtracted upon 
 occasion. It is too like an ex«cursion in a captive balloon; the 
 balloon returns to earth. 
 
 The whole scheme rests upon the fundamental fallacy that 
 
196 ACHIEVING CHARACTER 
 
 virtuous character Is made up by combining virtues, whereas, 
 the virtues, one and all, are abstractions, mere thought-things, 
 and therefore static only. Our concern is not that the pupil 
 should possess virtues, but that he should have virtue, that is, 
 strength in right causes. Here two conceptions are essential, 
 firmness of action, and discriminated, objective ends. Now, 
 objective moral ends or "causes" are those that arise in inter- 
 actions between individuals. In fact, only through social give- 
 and-take do ends of any sort — ^whether wealth, science, or artis- 
 tic production — become anything more than self-involution. 
 Ethical ends, such as charitable relief, follow the same law. 
 As long as my charitable act is simply an outlet for me, a mere 
 doing for another, it contains a fatal ethical defect. Real 
 charity, or love, is doing with another. Moral character im- 
 plies, then, that one has found something important to do that 
 requires the union of several wills, and it implies also that one 
 is firmly devoted to getting this thing done. 
 The consequences for moral education are these: 
 
 (1) The primary material for moral analysis is to be derived 
 from the child's experienced relations with persons, that is, from 
 his ordinary, every -day social contacts with both children and 
 adults, whether in the school, on the playground, on the street, 
 at home, in church, in buying and selling, or wherever. 
 
 (2) Imaginative material, whether historical or other, is to 
 be selected on the basis of its continuity with what the child 
 has already experienced in his relations with living persons, and 
 it is to be so used as to assist in the analysis of these relations. 
 To this point I shall return in a subsequent section. 
 
 (3) The natural growth of these contacts from the family 
 hearth outward yields a principle for the gradation of material. 
 Home, church, school and playground, local community, 
 national community, world community — these form a natural 
 ascending order of social contacts and of social interests and 
 functions. But this is an order of increasing complication; 
 it is not a stairway in which each step is left behind in the act 
 of reaching the next higher. We are not to graduate from the 
 home, but deeper and deeper into it, nor from the school, but 
 
ACHIEVING CHARACTER 197 
 
 further and further into the system of education until we take 
 upon ourselves full responsibility for the schooling of others. 
 
 (4) In all this material the centre for the pupil's attention 
 is men and women, particularly what they do, why they do it, 
 what the results are, and how perhaps something better might 
 have happened. What father and mother do, and why it needs 
 to be done ; what each family helper does ; what the grocer, the 
 postman, the physician, the policeman does; what the mayor, 
 the councilman, the police judge does; what a school, a fire de- 
 partment, a library, an art museum, a natural history collec- 
 tion does; how charities are organized and what they accom- 
 plish; why the Child Labor Association exists and what it is 
 doing — it is unnecessary to finish this inventory, for already it 
 must be clear that in the actual organization, work, and pur- 
 poses of persons as social agents, all the way from preparing 
 the family breakfast to promoting world peace, we have the 
 concrete material for enabling the pupil to form definite social 
 purposes of his own. In subsequent chapters we shall see how 
 this principle applies to the child's relation to the church. 
 
 With a large proportion of the persons involved in this in- 
 ventory children can have some personal contact. The most 
 significant thing about a grocery is the grocer, not his goods. 
 Guide the child's knowledge of the goods so that it shall include 
 acquaintance with the purveyors of them, and let buying and 
 selling be guided so that it shall be mutual service between buyer 
 and seller. Treat institutions in the same way. The library 
 clerk and the doorman at the museum, for example, are to be 
 discriminated from the things that they handle, and are to be 
 recognized as persons with whose acts the child's own life is 
 bound up, 
 
 (5) The irreducible factors in a morally educative situation, 
 whether it is encountered in experience or only in imagination, 
 are persons in their concrete individuality. The presence of 
 persons is what makes a situation ethical. Because they are 
 individual, irreducible, present as persons or not at all, a child's 
 moral progress consists, not in achieving one sort of moral good- 
 ness now, another next year, but in increasing control of whole 
 
198 ACHIEVING CHARACTER 
 
 personal situations. Thus, in abiding relations like the family, 
 he will show a firmer will to co-operate (ability to act socially 
 under greater strains), and ability to co-operate in more ways. 
 In addition, as his social relations grow more complicated, he 
 will put into them one after another the same intelligent, con- 
 structive good will. Progress like this is not likely to corre- 
 spond with any possible serial order of virtues or qualities of 
 character. Progress does not consist in any increase of a qual- 
 ity, but in achieving ends in "real life.'' One phase of such 
 progress can be measured by testing the changes that occur 
 in the pupil's ideas concerning social relations, but only one 
 phase. The full measure of any method of moral education is 
 the part played by the pupil in actual social relations. 
 
 Imagination and character. Social education by conscious 
 effort at adjustment to social reality describes the platform 
 that we have now reached. What, then, of story-telling, and 
 what of the world's treasure of imaginative literature? What 
 relation has imagination to the realistic educational processes 
 that are fundamental? This problem, looked at from the 
 psychological angle, is wider than it is ordinarily supposed to 
 be. For the contents of imagination are not at all restricted 
 to what is called imaginative. Historical characters and events 
 are made concrete to me by the same process that enables me to 
 grasp a fairy-tale. When I read the morning paper, too, 
 imagining events that the paper describes is what puts me 
 into touch with the real world. Yes, it is imagination that 
 puts me into touch with myself and with my immediate environ- 
 ment. It does it by holding before me my own yesterday, 
 or my own hour-ago, and also by holding before me the picture 
 of some possible future good. Here, moreover, we have not 
 only a reproductive, but also a productive, inventive, creative 
 process, and it is productive most of all where fresh adjustment 
 to reality is taking place. 
 
 ^ A child's imagination is a stage upon which programs of 
 possible action are rehearsed, with himself always as one of the 
 actors, albeit he is also a spectator. Small children do their 
 thinking largely in story form, their thinking even of situations 
 
ACHIEVING CHARACTER 199 
 
 that to grown-ups are prosily literal. This is a necessary part 
 of the trial-and-error method of learning to live. The trial- 
 and-error method, when it is educationally used, is no mere 
 lunging about until one happens to hit upon success, but the 
 following of programs of action previously discriminated from 
 other possible programs, and then noting the results. In 
 the imaginative rehearsals that are so characteristic of chil- 
 dren, particular parts are assigned, distinctions of social quality 
 are recognized, relations of social cause and effect are to some 
 extent noted, and the imaginer himself assumes a character. 
 This assumed character may, under favorable conditions, per- 
 sist as an attitude or special readiness for action after the dra- 
 matic rehearsal is over. An attitude is an initial stage in ac- 
 tual conduct; there is momentum in it. Thus it is that the im- 
 aginary can control the actual with children and with adults. 
 
 This rehearsing can take place in a story that a child is listen- 
 ing to as truly as in one that he invents. It is safe to assume 
 that any child, when he listens to a story in which the actors dis- 
 play contrasting social characters, takes one of them as himself. 
 In a certain kindergarten a story was told of a wild duck that 
 protected her ducklings from a pursuer b}^ hiding them among 
 rocks along a shore, sa;>dng: "Don't one of you stir, don't one 
 of you make a sound, don't even whisper." Then the story 
 went on: "Not one of them stirred, not one of them made a 
 sound, not one of them even whispered." At this point a boy 
 was heard to gasp : " I couldn't do that ! " The child who made 
 this remark was the one of all the group who was having the 
 hardest time learning to think twice and to await his turn. 
 Obviously this listening child was at work upon his own social 
 problem, upon realities, and it is equally obvious that to arrive 
 at such a true judgment upon one's faults is a natural step toward 
 correcting them. 
 
 The social experience and experimentation that produce 
 social growth can be extended, then, by imagination. There 
 is no necessary break between a fairy-story, an incident in the 
 life of a historical personage, and to-day's playground experi- 
 ence. It is the teacher's business to select and to use imagina- 
 
200 ACHIEVING CHARACTER 
 
 tive material, fiction as well as history and current events, so 
 that there shall be in it no break with real life. The match- 
 less power of Jesus as a teller of educative stories lies in part in 
 the utter continuity of the life process in his tales with that of 
 his hearers. If only the actors in stories for children are made 
 to act from simple motives in situations that are not too com- 
 plicated or far-fetched, continuity with child life is possible in 
 material that is derived not only from child life, but also from 
 adult life, animal life, and the realm of myth, folk-lore, and fairy- 
 tale. Plant life, too, and even inanimate objects can be used by 
 endowing them with human motives. Mountains can break 
 forth into singing, and the trees of the field can clap their hands. 
 
 Parents and teachers of very young children have the special 
 problem of helping their pupils to grasp the difference between 
 fiction and history. The clew to this problem lies in the truth 
 that there is no necessary break between fiction and "real" 
 life. The distinction is not that between stories that are true 
 and stories that are not true. There is nothing in any language 
 more true than, say, the fictitious narratives that Jesus told. 
 The difference between one of his tales and history lies in the 
 sphere in which the event takes place. The story sphere is 
 human motive; the historical sphere adds the full, socially com- 
 plicated bodily expression of motive; both spheres are real, 
 and they are continuous with each other. " Thou," said Nathan 
 to David, "ari the man." The Priest, the Levite, and the 
 Samaritan are realities within our own breasts. Santa Claus, 
 the spirit of Christmas giving, is a blessed reality, and so are 
 the other good fairies. 
 
 Under favorable conditions, I have said, an imaginatively 
 assumed character may persist as an attitude in overt action. 
 Probably the part that one plays in one's imagination invariably 
 has some tendency toward conduct of like quality. But the 
 tendency may be greater or less, and it may be more or less 
 thwarted by the setting that it has in the imaginary event. 
 The teacher has the task, not merely of causing the pupil to 
 rehearse imaginatively some sort of good act, but also that of 
 arranging the other factors in the rehearsal so that a particular 
 
ACHIEVING CHARACTER 201 
 
 attitude shall persist and pass on into the child's relations with 
 some actual human being. Before stating what this positively 
 requires, we may well pause to consider some methods that fail, 
 and why they fail. 
 
 Moralizing, or telling children what the application of the 
 story is, interferes with the educative process by drawing atten- 
 tion away from the concrete and particular to the abstract and 
 general. It interferes likewise by injecting the teacher's per- 
 sonality into the situation. If the story is an appropriate one 
 appropriately told, connection ^vith life is already there as the child 
 listens. To introduce a new vehicle to carry him over from the 
 story into life is to create distraction. Nor is this the worst of 
 it. For moralizing creates a new attitude of the pupil toward 
 the story as a whole. A moment ago he w^as living in the story; 
 now he sees that the story has no reality to the teacher, but is 
 only an extended way of uttering an abstraction; so the imaginary 
 becomes for him the unreal; and the goodness and the badness in 
 the story cease to be live issues. A healthy child is very likely, 
 under these circumstances, to form a habit of regarding moral 
 rules as prosy impositions upon life, dull things. 
 
 A method much in vogue in sermons to children is teaching by 
 analogy. A sensible object is presented, or a physical or chemical 
 experiment is performed, or an event in external nature is de- 
 scribed, and the attention of the children is then invited to the 
 similarity between this thing or process or event and life issues of 
 right and wrong. The method is apparently an attempt to take 
 advantage of children's spontaneous interest in sense-objects and 
 in sensible happenings, and to move the child mind on from the 
 sense-level to the level of ethical thought and appreciation. But 
 the device rests upon a fundamental misunderstanding. Ana- 
 logical thinking is not characteristic of children. They must have 
 a larger range of identities between the things that they compare, 
 going from person to person, say, with ease, but not from the 
 properties of physical things to qualities of character. When 
 children hang upon the preacher's words as he expounds an anal- 
 ogy they are likely to be attending to the physical side of the 
 analogy only. A minister once illustrated "Thou desirest truth 
 in the inward parts" by holding up a watch and calling attention 
 to the effects that would follow if the little wheels inside it got 
 
202 ACHIEVING CHARACTER 
 
 rusty. A small boy reported the minister as having said that 
 **If you tell lies you'll get rust in your stomach." In such cases 
 the child's attention fixes upon the symbol so intently as not to 
 move on with the preacher from the symbol to the thing sym- 
 bolized. In short, the imaginative material by means of which 
 children get control of actual social situations is that which has 
 a large rather than small number of elements, and particularly 
 motives, that are continuous with those of the child's social experi- 
 ence. 
 
 The positive conditions under which a dramatically assumed 
 moral attitude is most likely to pass on into conduct are in 
 general those that favor "transfer of training." The fact that 
 a child has been trained to neatness in his arithmetic papers 
 does not of itself guarantee that he will be equally neat in his 
 map-drawing; the fact that a man is truthful in certain relations 
 or with certain persons' does not prevent him from being untruth- 
 ful in a different set of relations or with a different set of persons. 
 The transfer of neatness, or of trutlifulness, or indeed of any 
 habit, from one situation to another depends upon such condi- 
 tions as the number of points in which the two situations are 
 identical with each other, and the definiteness with which one 
 has faced and understood and accepted as one's ideal the prin- 
 ciple that is involved in the good habit in question. A large 
 part of the present chapter has a bearing, as a matter of fact, 
 upon the transfer of moral training. For we have been occupieci 
 with the difference between particular good habits on the one 
 hand and readiness for moral discrimination on the other, and 
 between the exercise of good will upon conventional levels on 
 the one hand, and on the other hand the carrying forward of 
 good will into reconstruction of standards. The particular 
 application of the principles of transfer to the use of stories, his- 
 tory, current events, or other material of the imagination, is as 
 follows: 
 
 There must be many rather than few elements in the imagined 
 situation that are identical with elements in social situations 
 aheady experienced by the child. By identical elenients in social 
 situations I mean, not the externals of life, but persons, their char- 
 
ACHIEVING CHARACTER 203 
 
 acteristic interactions, and consequences of conduct as they are 
 determined by laws (natural laws and laws of the state) and cus- 
 tom. 
 
 The imagined situation should be so constructed and presented 
 as to contain a social problem of a type that the child has already 
 encountered, together with at least some steps toward the solu- 
 tion. Something unsettled, suspense, light coming from the 
 consequences of conduct, these consequences occurring not ar- 
 bitrarily or by chance but in accordance with the actual laws of 
 life — all this should be in the imagined situation itself, so that 
 the teacher does not need to translate anything into a different 
 language. 
 
 It is not enough, however, that the material should represent 
 important laws of life; these laws must be made to seem impor- 
 tant. There must be perspective. This is to be had, not by 
 telling the child what is important but by the selection and ar- 
 rangement of details, as in climaxes, and by such methods as 
 emphasis, repetition of key-phrases, and tone of voice. Discus- 
 sion of the story by the pupils under suggestive guidance from the 
 parent or teacher, and dramatization under such guidance, add 
 still further to the production of perspective as well as to depth 
 of impression. 
 
 Whatever be the proportions of pleasure and pain, joy and sad- 
 ness, in the personal experiences portrayed in the story, these 
 experiences must be so organized and presented that the child 
 who listens will imaginatively side with the right against the 
 wrong, and get pleasure from doing so. Not, indeed, pleasure 
 without cost, not the pleasure of passivity, for this would be 
 untrue to the realities of the moral life. Struggle, pain, failures, 
 sacrifice must not be slurred in the content of the story, or in the 
 pupil's imaginative participation in it. He must be led at times 
 to take sides with what is hard and disagreeable, and even this 
 taking of sides in imagination will cost him an effort. Yet there 
 should be here also the joy of winning, some realization that the 
 socially right alternative is more agreeable than its opposite. It 
 is easy to dislocate the pleasure of the listening child; the story 
 may be very different to him from what it is to the teacher. "Chil- 
 dren," said a clergyman in a talk to a Sunday school, "when you 
 get to heaven, whom do you want to see first?" A ten-year-old 
 boy, being pressed for an answer, replied: "Goliath." 
 
 When an actual situation subsequently arises that involves a 
 
204 ACHIEVING CHARACTER 
 
 problem that has already been at least partly solved in a story, 
 the skilful use of a phrase from the story, or a mere allusion to an 
 event in it, may help. But not if reminding constitutes nagging, 
 and whether it does constitute nagging or not depends upon the 
 pupU's attitude toward it, not upon the teacher's intention. But 
 we must not forget that a normal child who lives in wholesome social 
 relations desires to be helped. He wants to achieve. No conceal- 
 ment is necessary, no subterfuge. The effective reminder is the 
 one that brings him this help, and makes him feel that doing right 
 is made easier. Here is another instance of the law that in moral 
 training the major keys of pleasure must predominate. This is 
 the reason why humor is so valuable both in story material and in 
 direct relations between teacher and pupil, humor, that is to say, 
 that enables the teacher to laugh with the pupil, not at him. 
 
PART IV 
 
 THE ORGANIZATION OF A SOCIALIZED 
 RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN REORGANIZATION OF 
 THE FAMILY 
 
 The family as a determiner of the social type. When does 
 a human being make his debut into society ? When he is born 
 into the common Hfe of mother, father, and child. A family is 
 a society, and it is an educational institution of the very first 
 significance. "Where was he educated?" is often asked, and 
 the answer is given: "In such or such a college," or perhaps: 
 "In the public schools of his State," whereas the most that 
 school and college are likely to have contributed to him is some 
 sort of superstructure built upon foundations of social char- 
 acter already laid. Just as it was said of Peter, "Thou also 
 art one of them, for thy speech maketh thee known," so any 
 observant teacher sees in a student's manners and in his use of 
 language an index of his home life. And deeper than words 
 and accents, deeper than manners, is a substratum of social 
 presuppositions and social attitudes that home life has already 
 made firm. 
 
 The reason why family life has peculiar influence in respect 
 to the social substratum of the character is this: The long de- 
 pendence of the child for so many of his satisfactions upon the 
 same few persons, and the intimacy and continuity of his rela- 
 tions with them. In this intimacy with persons he deals with 
 what is elemental and final in the ethical and the religious life. 
 Many parents believe that the social experiences of small chil- 
 dren are insignificant, mere time-fillers that are to pass away 
 with the time that they occupy, whereas these experiences form 
 firm notions of what a person is, of what is due from one person 
 to another as a person, and of what concerns in life are im- 
 
 207 
 
208 THE FAMILY 
 
 portant or unimportant. These notions become the presupposi- 
 tions of futures thinking on social relations. They are wrought 
 into habits, too, and are bound up with whatever life purpose 
 or ambition a child or youth forms. 
 
 The family, moreover, is not an isolated society, for Into and 
 out of it flows the life-blood of civilization in the large. Through 
 his parents the child is under the tutelage of the traditions, cus- 
 toms, and economic conditions that have made his parents to 
 be what they are. Thus it is that a social standpoint, high or 
 low. Christian or un-Christian, may, through the personal in- 
 timacy of parent and child, become to the child a self-evident 
 and even sacred thing. No child merely plays around the out- 
 side of society. In the intimacy of the family every member, 
 younger or older, is a feeling part of social processes. He is 
 included within a network of concrete relations between per- 
 sons — between the stronger and the weaker, between male and 
 female, between buyer and seller, between the employer and the 
 employed. The child is not prepared to weigh these relations. 
 He knows not how to sift out the wheat that is always there. 
 He may even accept injustice to himself as something that be- 
 longs within natural and proper social relations.^ 
 
 It is the fundamentals of social justice that are at stake 
 in the child* s experience in his father's family. Family 
 government, to begin with, tends to fix one's ideas as to the 
 basal rights of men. Consider the educational difference be- 
 tween a family in which each child, however young, has rights 
 that the older and stronger members respect, and a family in 
 which no child is aware that he has any rights that are respected 
 by his own father and mother, or by older brothers and sisters. 
 Genuine parental affection can be mixed with caprice and self- 
 
 I The educational power of family intimacies is well illustrated by the 
 almost universal regard for family honor. There are few things that awaken 
 anger and resentment as uniformly as opprobrious remarlss about one's family. 
 A stiU more remarkable illustration is the rarity of incest. There is nothing 
 in our instinctive endowment to make incestuous relations unattractive. 
 Yet a traditional standard, passed down from generation to generation merely 
 as a presupposition about which almost nothing is said, holds instinct in 
 complete control, nay, has all the force of a negative instinct or impossibility 
 of desire. 
 
THE FAMILY 209 
 
 will, and genuine self-sacrifice may lack real respect for the per- 
 sonality of the one on whose behalf the sacrifice is made. Even 
 a firm, steady, and genuinely benevolent family government 
 may fail to produce in the children any heartfelt respect for law 
 simply because the government to which they are subjected is 
 an autocracy. Thus it is that out of the same domestic spring 
 may come water both bitter and sweet — regard for some rights, 
 disregard for others equally basal; respect for persons in one 
 classification, disrespect for persons in another; tenderness in 
 some human relations, callousness in others; sincere belief in 
 the Christian ideal of brotherhood, sincerity in conduct that 
 obviously defeats it. 
 
 Here is the explanation of the paradox in a rather common 
 attitude of men toward women. Almost every child experi- 
 ences tender maternal affection; hence almost every man re- 
 tains through life some capacity for noble emotion with respect 
 to his own mother and with respect to motherhood in general. 
 Men who have this emotion commonly assume that they hold 
 an exalted view of womanhood. Yet many of them regard 
 marriage as properly the subjection of a woman to a man. 
 Many of them are willing to accept profits that depend upon 
 risks to the health and the morals of working women. Men 
 glorify motherhood in one breath, and in the next buy from 
 a hundred girls their capacity for competent motherhood ! 
 Moreover, how is it that reverence for womanhood "because 
 one has had a mother" can exist in the same breast with accep- 
 tance of prostitution as a matter of course? The key to this 
 situation is this : Boys — and girls too — acquire in the family a 
 second sort of presupposition with respect to womanhood, a 
 presupposition based upon the habitual attitude of the males 
 in the family to wife, daughter, or sister. How far would one 
 overshoot the truth if one should assert that rarely does a boy 
 acquire in his own family a firm presupposition that girls are 
 his equals? It is because boys grow up as intimate parts of 
 actual sex inequality that men fail to see the grotesqueness of 
 the assumption that one sex has an inherent right to determine 
 the "proper sphere'* of the other. Is there not, in fact, a trace 
 
210 THE FAMILY 
 
 of condescension or patronage even in the common glorification 
 of "mother" ? Admiring tenderness is easier, too, than justice. 
 
 Thus it is that fundamental social assumptions and habits — 
 those that concern the valuation of the individual, personal 
 liberty, social classifications, the relations of the sexes, the right 
 of property, the nature of law, alid the sphere of government — 
 flow from the large society into the small family society, and 
 thence back into the large society. If we desire to reform any 
 one of them, there can be no more effective measure than to 
 induce parents to reorganize family life. If the Christian 
 churches really believe in universal brotherhood, with its 
 inevitable corollary of a world-democracy, let them begin now 
 to form democratic presuppositions and habits at the source. 
 " " On what conditions can family life educate for democracy? 
 The general answer is. By being, in its measure, a co-operative 
 group of the deliberative type. The family is to prepare chil- 
 dren for democracy by being itself a democracy. On the 
 face of the matter, is it not absurd to think that inequality and 
 arbitrary rule within the society in which an individual spends 
 his most plastic years can prepare him to labor toward a society 
 that is based on exactly contrary principles ? 
 
 It will be objected, of course, that any attempt to make the 
 family into a deliberative group will hit upon the rock of chil- 
 dren's incapacity for deliberation, the discontinuity of their 
 attention, the fact that it is child nature to act immediately in 
 one way or another. Does not the practical impossibility of 
 suspense and postponement render it necessary for the father 
 and the mother to make decisions for the child, blocking the 
 way to harmful acts, and moving him by their power rather 
 than his own into wholesome ways? To argue thus, however, 
 is to miss the main point of the problem, and to act thus is to 
 miss an opportunity for the social education of the young. 
 The main question is. What sort of experience tends to make the 
 child into a socially deliberative individual ? What is the most 
 certain and the most rapid way to enfranchise him? To pro- 
 vide the conditions for this sort of experience is the base-line of 
 social education. Upon this basis the family must present to 
 
THE FAMILY 211 
 
 the child opportunity for fellowship in fundamental, outgoing 
 brotherhood. An outline of some of these conditions will in- 
 dicate the direction in which the Christian reorganization of 
 the family has to move. 
 
 (1) Abajidon the doctrine and the practice of the inequality of 
 the sexes. If children are bred in the assumption that even 
 among the persons with whom they have the most intimate and 
 affectionate relations nature itself has established a permanent, 
 impassable division between the rulers and the ruled, the served 
 and the servers, if children go into the world saturated with any 
 such assumption, the males, already accustomed to the in- 
 dividualistic satisfactions of a superior caste, will tend to lord 
 it wherever they can, and the females, unaccustomed to free 
 initiative, will withhold from society services that they are by 
 nature well qualified to render. It is hard to imagine a way in 
 which Christianity could more decisively promote appreciation 
 of humanity as such, which is the spirit of brotherhood, than 
 the abolition of the sex caste in Christian families. 
 
 Tender, admiring, reverential affection, ennobling though 
 it be to the one who feels it, is no proper substitute for the 
 recognition of equality. Not seldom tenderness contains in it- 
 self the unrecognized but cruel poison of wanting to keep its 
 object, whether wife or child, permanently dependent and in- 
 ferior. On the other hand, the recipient of such regard is often 
 pampered thereby into selfish receptivity, or else beguiled into 
 a narrow, almost slavish devotion which in turn pampers the 
 man who accepts it. Thus, love itself, acting under the assump- 
 tion of permanent inequality between the lovers, arrests the 
 growth of the social capacities of both. Even within the family 
 this arrest often manifests itself in hypertrophied demands of 
 either lover upon the other. Whether or not children witness 
 such marital infelicity, they have no experience that enables 
 them to see the social significance of the inequality in the midst 
 of which they live. They take this inequality as a matter of 
 nature, as something self-evident. They accept the satis- 
 factions that it brings, or accommodate themselves to the limi- 
 tations involved, and so go into the world with a fundamental 
 
212 THE FAMILY 
 
 defect in their faith in man and in their preparation for a world 
 brotherhood. 
 
 (2) Develop capacity for deliberative group life by respecting 
 and effectively utilizing any such capacity, however slight, that 
 any member already possesses. The right to be heard, the right 
 to have one's ideas and desires weighed by others, is the re- 
 verse side of the duty to listen and to be ready, when the com- 
 mon good requires it, to waive one's wishes. The reciprocal 
 relation between rights and duties holds not only as between 
 adult and adult, but also as between adults and children. Par- 
 ents who do not listen and weigh ought not to be surprised if 
 their progeny is heedless and stiff-necked. Parents who never 
 "own up" to a fault, and never make open amends, may expect 
 to encounter the same sort of infallibility in their children. The 
 difficulty of developing a democratic family organization lies 
 less in children's limitations than in the stiffness and unadap- 
 tability that are fostered by current conceptions of parental 
 dignity and authority. Children like to talk things over seri- 
 ously when they know that the outcome of the conversation has 
 not been arbitrarily predetermined. An artificial class-dis- 
 tinction exists in many a family because parents underestimate 
 the thought-capacity of their children. What surer way can 
 there be to create in children a class-consciousness that is un- 
 sympathetic and impervious to parental authority? Any- 
 thing that prevents the honest, serious, and effective utilization 
 of childish capacities tends to stunt them. To be a listening 
 parent implies much more than giving attention to com- 
 plaint or clamor when it arises; it means also consulting chil- 
 dren, sharing with them the really important problems of the 
 family, and letting them participate in working out solutions. 
 It means, too, that this consultative relation between parent 
 and child is to be extended and developed as fast as the child's 
 mental grasp increases, 
 
 (3) In a democratic family each member will perform regular, 
 defined, personal services for the maintenance of the common life. 
 This innocent-looking proposition is full of sharp points. Each 
 member will contribute personal service, which is a thing that 
 
THE FAMILY 213 
 
 money cannot buy and that cannot be done by proxy. Personal 
 service may take the form of earning money for family use, but 
 there is much "supporting one's family" that does not include 
 giving oneself. Providing plenty of "servants" is not at all the 
 same as contributing personal service. Every member of the 
 family will be in his own person a servant of the family, being 
 made thereby conformable to the Great Servant who has re- 
 vealed in his own person the great God. Here child and 
 parent will meet on the truly democratic plane of industry, 
 useful labor, done co-operatively for the common weal, and with 
 no compensation except the common weal. Finally, the ser- 
 vice that is required of each individual will have a defined 
 sphere, beyond which one may indeed give but no one may de- 
 mand. When the service of love, freely given, becomes sub- 
 serviency to unregulated, and hence unsocialized, calls for 
 service, the result is little more than slavery. Its undemocratic 
 character is not relieved by the fact that the slave loves the 
 master and willingly obeys. 
 
 (4) In a democratic family each member will have a defined 
 sphere in which he is entitled to initiative, and likewise one in 
 which his own judgment is final. Dependence of a child upon the 
 decisions of others is to be reduced as rapidly as is consistent 
 with physical safety, health, and the continuance of his educa- 
 tion. Doing for oneself all that one is competent to do is a 
 significant contribution to the common weal, and it is highly ed- 
 ucative. Self-reliant experimentation must be encouraged even 
 though we are certain that errors will be made, and from the 
 uncomfortable effects of his errors a child must not be too much 
 shielded. The important thing is not to get the most perfect 
 possible immediate result, but to promote growth, to develop 
 individuality that is both independent and co-operative. A 
 good example of the principle is presented by certain parents 
 who grant each child a regular allowance of money, require 
 open and accurate accounting, increase the amount with 
 growth, and require each child increasingly to purchase his own 
 clothing from his own income, first with aid from the parent in 
 the way of explanations as to colors, durability, style, etc., but 
 
214 THE FAMILY 
 
 later without consultation. What a blunder it is to keep on 
 deciding everything for a child up to young manhood or young 
 womanhood, under the expectation that then, by some hocus- 
 pocus of benevolent nature he will suddenly acquire good judg- 
 ment ! And the worst thing about this policy is not that it 
 puts upon young men and young women tasks for which they 
 have not been prepared, but that it leaves their social capacities 
 uncultivated. To keep children dependent-willed as long as 
 possible is to isolate them into a social class even under their 
 father's own roof. Denying them the experience of progressive 
 co-operative judging, it fits them for none but arbitrary social 
 relations thereafter. 
 
 (5) Democracy in the family is to he promoted by providing 
 common pleasures. Not long ago I learned of a family in which 
 the father as well as the mother takes part regularly in the chil- 
 dren's daily story hour preceding bedtime. In another instance 
 a father and mother provided a combination dining-table and 
 billiard-table, and evening after evening played interesting 
 matches with their children. It is a sinister sign if father, 
 mother, adolescent boy, and adolescent girl must all go out of 
 the home and away from one another in order to have a good 
 time. The sign is sinister even if the diversions that are sought 
 are unobjectionable in themselves, for the absence of common 
 pleasures is the absence of a most important social cement. 
 When a parent and a child frolic together they become ac- 
 quainted with each other. Each finds in the other personality 
 riches that would otherwise, perhaps, be unsuspected. Family 
 life is famishing for want of deep acquaintance between parents 
 and their owti offspring. And not only do common pleasures 
 reveal one to another, but — under the basal law of habit forma- 
 tion that satisfaction in an act tends to prolongation and repeti- 
 tion thereof — they help toward the deep and permanent attach- 
 ments that hold through adversity as well as through happiness. 
 Thus it is that playing together; enjoying literature, music, 
 and pictures together; making family excursions into the open; 
 going together to places of amusement, and even common in- 
 dulgence in jolly nonsense have the deep ethical value of join- 
 ing person to person in a society of reciprocal good will. 
 
THE FAMILY 215 
 
 (6) The unity of the family cannot he made perfect until family 
 consciousness is fused with a udder social consciousness, particu- 
 larly through participation by all members of the family in remedial 
 and constructive social enterprises. The mere fact that the 
 children, when they marry, and in the social acquaintanceships 
 that precede marriage, link their own family with others is of 
 itself sufficient to prove that regard for one's own flesh and blood 
 is an expansive principle. The weal of my family is inextri- 
 cably bound up in a thousand ways with that of others. Chil- 
 dren of different families play together, go to school together; 
 infect one another with disease germs, with smutt}^ ideas, with 
 bad habits; later they employ one another or are employed, 
 they bargain with one another, they vote for or against one an- 
 other, they determine the sanitary and moral conditions of 
 the community. The child of wealth who was infected with a 
 fatal disease by wearing a garment made in a sweat-shop illus- 
 trates a solidarity that no individual or family can escape. 
 There is simply no possibility of fulfilling love in a narrow circle 
 except by treating the circle as a section of the total social 
 sphere. The exclusive family is the self-undermining family. 
 Therefore the building up of deliberative group living in the 
 family must be continuous with the building forth of the same 
 thing in the community. It is not enough that the father 
 should contribute of his substance and of his energy to the out- 
 going social enterprises of the church or of the neighborhood — 
 the family as a family should talk them over, weigh the needs, 
 form a united purpose, and work together for the fulfilment of it. 
 
 Even young children can participate from the heart in great 
 social enterprises because the greatness of a social enterprise 
 grows out of the elemental character of the human need that it 
 seeks to meet. There is perhaps no defect of society that does 
 not inflict hunger and sickness upon children, and this appeals 
 to any child. Moreover, children's imaginations easily seize 
 upon some point of difference between better and worse social 
 conditions — between good and poor school buildings and 
 grounds; clean and unclean streets and alleys; sanitary fac- 
 tories and unsanitary sweat-shops; humane and inhumane 
 conditions in industries and in housing; war and peace, and 
 
216 THE FAMILY 
 
 much more. When the missionary enterprise is clearly con- 
 scious of Its social calling, it comes home to children with the 
 force of reality, and not as an abstract propaganda. The par- 
 ticipation of children In the social movement should, of course, 
 be graded; new enterprises will allure as power of analysis and 
 continuity of purpose grow. But this does not mean that 
 small children can have a vital part in none but small enter- 
 prises. The elemental character of their social attitudes joins 
 them directly and simply with their elders in great undertak- 
 ings. And besides, fellowship with a parent in doing some- 
 thing that the parent feels to be Important brings its own de- 
 light, its own sense of the reality of the matter. 
 
 Finally, a noble common purpose, and united labor and If 
 need be suffering for another, are essential to the full realiza- 
 tion of Intimate affection. If we go back far enough in the 
 evolution of marriage we find that mating Is a temporary 
 affair, not yet marriage in the proper sense. How Is it, then, 
 that such fleeting sex attraction has grown as far as it has 
 already done toward lasting conjugal affection? In spite of 
 prevalent defects In marriage, and of the great underworld of 
 infidelity on the part of both the married and the unmarried, 
 the world already contains numberless instances of unsullied, 
 lifelong affection between one man and one woman, and, more- 
 over, in the presence of a standard like this the world does not 
 condemn the standard but Itself, or at most seeks excuses for 
 the despite that It still does to such love. What has brought 
 this about is the presence of children who needed long years 
 of care. Thus, historically considered, conjugal affection is 
 not the prius of parental love, but just the reverse. It Is the 
 child who binds the parents together. Love grows rich enough 
 to defy time and the fluctuations of sexual desire because there 
 is common work for the lovers to do, yes, because their fondness 
 ,for each other goes out and takes in a third. This Is not an 
 isolated fact, but a law of life. Idle affection grows stagnant. 
 Our friendships, our social circles, our churches, and our fam- 
 ilies find life for themselves only as they bestow life upon 
 others. 
 
THE FAMILY 217 
 
 (7) These conditions cannot he met without the domestication I 
 of private property. Family life is psychophysical. Affection 
 between its members is embodied, incarnate. The family 
 table is not only its symbol, but also one of its important in- 
 struments. In the fellowship of eating and drinking the domes- 
 tication of private property is taken for granted. " If any pro- 
 videth not for his own . . . household, he hath denied the faith, 
 and is worse than an unbeliever." But if this is so obvious, 
 why do we not see that upon the same principle all the property 
 that any member of the family has should be domesticated? 
 For what is property if not means for human life ? And what 
 is the right of property if not a call to the enlargement of life? 
 And what is the family but partnership in life and in the pro- 
 motion of living? And how can there be the supreme fellow- 
 ship of a common, outgoing purpose if one member of the 
 group is the autocratic master of the means whereby the group 
 itself lives and of the means whereby the group might enrich 
 other life than its own? The reservation of such mastership 
 as a right, even though its actual exercise be liberal, is simply 
 incompatible with the thorough domestication of the master's 
 will. 
 
 Christian teaching has long recognized that there is a cleft 
 between property as a legal right and property as a moral 
 obligation. The law sustains me absolutely if I withhold my 
 goods while my neighbor starves; it protects the sharp bar- 
 gains whereby I accumulate goods at the expense of others; 
 and, as to the family, it lays upon me only the mild obligation 
 of feeding, clothing, and sheltering wife and children, leaving 
 to my sense or my whim the feeding or the starving of their 
 other capacities. Our religion constantly admonishes us to 
 be better in these respects than the law requires us to be. But 
 at the centre of the problem of private property, which is the 
 family hearth, there is as yet no clear interpretation of the 
 Christian law of brotherhood. The common assumption is that 
 God requires nothing more of the individual in whom the legal 
 title inheres than a certain arbitrary benevolence toward the 
 members of his own family. The admonition to even this 
 
218 THE FAMILY 
 
 modicum of virtue is not vociferous 1 This assumption lacks, 
 too, the definiteness of the legal right to withhold — a right that 
 individualistic love of power guards with jealousy, and even 
 confuses with moral right. 
 
 Here, in short, is an ancient wall of division within the family 
 itself, a class distinction, a fundamental denial of brotherhood. 
 Property comes between persons. It is, to be sure, a wall of 
 glass only; any member of the family may look through it at 
 the good deeds wrought by the member who is on the other 
 side, but one may not reach one's hands through so as to share 
 in the doing of the good deeds. In how many churches do hus- 
 bands and wives make contributions as equals? How many 
 holders of the purse escape being infected with the silent as- 
 sumption that those whom one "supports" are dependents, 
 inferiors, persons to be controlled by giving and withholding, or 
 perchance favorites who are to be attached to oneself by lar- 
 gesses ? ^ 
 
 This is not the atmosphere of democracy, and children who 
 are brought up in it are not being adequately prepared to take 
 the full part of a Christian in the great and growingly acute 
 economic struggle. To be merciful and to be moderate will 
 not be sufficient to reconstruct our social order. Something 
 far more sacrificial will be required of us if the distribution of 
 goods, which is the distribution of power and opportunity to 
 live, is to become brotherly. Even if we are not yet certain 
 which of several forks of the road to take in the legal revision 
 of economic inequalities and injustices, there is no reason why 
 we should not set to work at once to give love full sway in family 
 education. This will involve, first and foremost, the beginning 
 of economic enfranchisement for married women by the volun- 
 tary act of husbands. It would be a great step if a stated 
 amount were to be received by each married woman as her 
 earnings, to be disposed of with freedom equal to that of the 
 
 1 What unconscious irony there is in the frequent boast of men who insist 
 upon the inequality of the sexes, "We hold women to be our superiors." 
 What a cheap and tawdry homage is thisl "You are a goddess!" Tagore 
 makes Kumo's husband say, but she replies: "No, no, no! I am not going 
 to be a goddess any longer ... I am just an ordinary woman." The Hungry 
 Stones (New York, 1916), p. 169. 
 
THE FAMILY 219 
 
 husband in the disposition of his own earnings or income. 
 But beyond this will come partnership between husband and 
 wife as equals in stewardship of the entire family income. 
 The constant problem will be how to do the most good with 
 what we have, and not seldom there will be the added problem 
 of how we shall increase this our power to do good — that is, 
 the wife will not be an outsider to any of her husband's business 
 concerns. What this implies in the training of girls and young 
 women is evident. It will make for a sturdier domestic character 
 in women — and in men, too. And — here is our present con- 
 cern — it will introduce the children, both boys and girls, to the 
 democratic spirit in actual operation, and it will furnish a stand- 
 ard whereby they will be able to detect the various tyrannies 
 that creep, under other titles, through modern society. 
 
 Finally, the domestication of property will include the gradual 
 economic enfranchisement of each child. That is, he will be 
 given control of property, but held to social responsibilities. 
 By "social responsibilities" is meant not only one's share of 
 domestic labor, but also one's share in studying (which should 
 have economic recognition as productive labor), and one's share 
 in social enterprises in church and community. The whole 
 should be treated from the beginning of the child's experience 
 of money, not as private gain from being good, but as participa- 
 tion in the family's enterprise, and thereby as participation 
 in the life of the community. In short. In the family the child's 
 experience of property can and should be an experience of some- 
 thing that binds men together, not of something that keeps them 
 apart. 
 
 The interest of religion in the economic status of the 
 family. What has just been said assumes the existence of 
 what may be called well-to-do living conditions such as: 
 
 Housing that is not only sanitary, but also adequate, in space 
 and in furnishings, for happy group life, and for distributed 
 home duties. 
 
 Culture material, such as books and music and pictures. 
 
 Opportunity for each child to have schooling as far as his 
 abilities and his Interests can carry him. 
 
220 THE FAMILY 
 
 Sufficient leisure on the part of parents to enable them to 
 spend considerable time in the company of their children. 
 
 Sufficient freedom from fatiguing labor to make it possible 
 for parents to play with their children. 
 
 Sufficient income to enable the family to take part in com- 
 munity affairs, such as religious, philanthropic, recreational, 
 cultural, and civic enterprises. 
 
 Every one of these conditions is important for the religious 
 education of children in the family. Yet families whose place 
 in the economic scale is below that of the "middle class" are 
 ipso facto excluded from one or more of these conditions, in 
 multitudes of cases from all of them. 
 
 That many beautiful characters bloom out of domestic dep- 
 rivation; that suffering itself sometimes brings the sufferers 
 close to one another; that much improvement of home training 
 is possible even under the conditions that prevail below the 
 "middle class family" — all this is true and important. But it 
 is not an appreciable offset to the economic depression that is 
 upon multitudes of families, upon them not merely as an 
 occasional emergency, but upon them permanently as the un- 
 escapable grip of an economic fate. Our glorification of the 
 higher life — the life of persons united with one another by 
 good will — is ignorant mockery if we do not see that depriva- 
 tion of nutrition, of the company of parents, of the physical 
 things whereby knowledge and beauty and good will are com- 
 municated from man to man, is deprivation of opportunity to 
 be a person, deprivation of opportunity to form a good will. 
 
 Therefore the cause of social education in the family is all 
 one with the demand for improving the economic status of the 
 family as such. Every Christian church and every Christian 
 family may be expected to identify themselves, as a matter that 
 involves their own life or death, with such movements as these : 
 
 To abolish child labor; 
 
 To shorten the hours of labor for men and for women; 
 To improve the sanitary and moral conditions of labor; 
 To increase the income of most families; 
 
THE FAMILY 221 
 
 To forestall unemployment, and to provide for accident, sickness, 
 and old age; 
 
 To improve housing conditions; 
 
 To provide playgrounds, wholesome amusements, and cultural 
 opportunities for every community; 
 
 To remove the saloon, the haunts of vice, and degrading amuse- 
 ments; 
 
 To keep the organs of the commimity life — local and other govern- 
 mental officials — responsive to the needs and views of the masses; 
 
 To improve the human stock by adequate supervision of health, 
 by preventing the propagation of obviously unfit strains, and by 
 inducing wiser mating; 
 
 To provide a diversified education that, keeping close to the 
 people, shall be adapted on the one hand to their industrial 
 needs, and on the other hand to bringing out and developing 
 to the full whatever special talent individuals may possess. 
 
 There are various ways of putting on the harness of a cause 
 like this. Three of these ways that have a particularly close 
 relation to religious education may be mentioned : (a) Religious 
 education in the Sunday school may well include participation in 
 these movements at the points where they most obviously touch 
 child life, (b) The family can reinforce the Sunday school at 
 these points, feeding during the week the interests that are 
 aroused on Sunday, or even anticipating the Sunday school by 
 taking social problems to it. (c) Most communities contain 
 families that are depressed by the conditions that have just been 
 analyzed. Here pastoral visitation may well include an in- 
 quiry into the child life of the community, and groups of adults 
 may well undertake community surveys, and then adopt such 
 community programs as the conditions seem to require. 
 
 The problem of family worship. For some years there 
 have been complaints that family religion is declining. The 
 old customs of family prayer, catechizing, and direct, personal 
 religious appeal from parent to child have largely disappeared. 
 The reasons for this disappearance are found partly in industrial 
 and other conditions of modern society that separate the mem- 
 bers of the family for many hours of the day, and partly in sheer 
 parental neglect. The remedy that is most often attempted is 
 
222 THE FAMILY 
 
 mutual Incitement of ministers by one another to arouse parents 
 to re-establish "the family altar." In spite of untoward con- 
 ditions, it is said, time can be found for devotions, and if neces- 
 sary some sacrifice of other interests should be made in order 
 that children may grow up in the knowledge and the practice of 
 religion. 
 
 That agitation of this kind has had little practical effect 
 would probably be admitted by all. The so-called seculariza- 
 tion of the family — even of church families — goes on apace 
 even though we continually declare that the issue is a vital one 
 for our religion. Is it not possible that some elements of the 
 problem have been left out of the account? For example, has 
 not the accusation of parental neglect covered, in addition to 
 infirmity of purpose, a certain bewilderment for which parents 
 are not responsible ? Two generations back there was relatively 
 little question as to the sort of religious ideas that should be 
 presented to children. Almost any part of the Bible might be 
 read at family worship, for it was all alike the word of God. 
 No caution was necessary as to the impression made upon chil- 
 dren by a biblical passage, for a particular interpretation, im- 
 posed by authority, was the sovereign antidote for all errors. 
 How to pray was clear, for the outline of the dogmatic system 
 needed only to be rephrased in order to appear as worship. 
 Catechizing was the simple process of drilling certain finished 
 ideas or verbal formulas into the memory. Even personal relig- 
 ious appeal could follow an easy and uniform tradition as to the 
 lost estate of man and the conditions of salvation. 
 
 It is scarcely necessary to say that neither the content nor 
 the method of such family religion can be restored. The duty 
 that is before us is not restoration, but revision and reconstruc- 
 tion from the foundation upward. Parents are bewildered be- 
 cause they do not see what sort of reasonable religious life can 
 be shared in any vital way by parents and children. The preach- 
 ing of religion as life in distinction from dogma, and the proc- 
 lamation of the social content of the gospel, have not made 
 sufficiently clear as yet what these things imply with respect 
 to the domestic circle. 
 
THE FAMILY 223 
 
 Let us come at once to the core of the matter. The recon- 
 struction of fireside religion will require the formation within 
 the family of common social purposes so deep that they reach 
 the level of worship. The principle that underlies the discussion, 
 in an earlier chapter, of the church as an organization of worship 
 applies to the family also. Not by saying: "Lord, Lord" shall 
 we introduce children to Christ, but rather by giving them 
 a share in Chris tly enterprises, and then letting the motive 
 thereof come to full consciousness as fellowship with Jesus and 
 with the Father. Here will be found a guide for the selection of 
 biblical passages that are really appropriate for family worship, 
 passages that will be luminous to children as well as to adults. 
 Here, too, will be found a language for prayer that parents and 
 children can use in the same sense. The common joys of the 
 family will utter themselves in gratitude, and so will the joys 
 of others with whom the members of the family feel their unity. 
 Conjoint confession of sin will have meaning because the con- 
 trasts of life will be revealed in the enterprise of social living. 
 From the same vital source will spring the inextinguishable social 
 aspiration that is the heart of intercession, namely, the identi- 
 fication of our claim upon life itself with the claim of others. 
 Children will realize the presence of God, just as their parents 
 will do, in the **love that will not let us go," the love that is 
 at once command, and condemnation, and reconciliation, and 
 the power of a higher life. 
 
 Education for married life and for parenthood. The sort 
 of sex-consciousness that refuses to face the conditions essential 
 to the rational — that is, socially foresighted — control of one of 
 the primal factors in social weal or woe is an immodest "mod- 
 esty." The essence of the immodesty lies in making self promi- 
 nent in the thought of sex. Once we take the social point of 
 view with respect to it, the whole perspective changes. Frank- 
 ness then becomes natural and wholesome wherever discussion of 
 the physiological and the ethical laws involved in the sexual life 
 can contribute anything to a better society. Specific prepara- 
 tion for marriage and for parenthood then becomes a funda- 
 mental interest of religious education. In the divorce evil we 
 
224 THE FAMILY 
 
 are reaping tares that were sown while Christian education was 
 asleep to its social calling. While it distributed among the 
 youth maxims of private goodness and of individualistic salva- 
 tion, the conditions of modern life were loosing the family from 
 its old moorings, but providing it with no chart or compass for 
 its voyage. The prevalence of divorce, moreover, is only 
 an acute symptom of a general failure to reorganize the family 
 upon a higher social plane when the old, semi-patriarchal basis 
 began its inevitable crumbling.^ The churches have before 
 them the task of transforming life in church families in accor- 
 dance with the social principles of the gospel. This implies 
 far more than fresh legislation on marriage and divorce, far more 
 than palliation of strains that arise in a family that lacks a 
 clear, outgoing social purpose; it implies nothing less than in- 
 structing and training children specifically for marriage and 
 parenthood as the first and foremost sphere for the deliberate 
 organization and control of society as a democracy of God. 
 
 Not only is sex-instruction necessary as a part of religious 
 education, but the level of this instruction must be made utterly 
 social. The avoidance of harm to oneself must be simply a 
 phase of a positive purpose of good for others. All the " Thou 
 shalt nots," which have been presented hitherto as laws of 
 one's own individual perfection or righteousness, are to be trans- 
 formed into parts of an ambition to marry, to contribute to the 
 happiness of a spouse, to have healthy, happy children, and 
 through them to contribute to the larger society. Here is the 
 point of view that should prevail with respect to prostitution. 
 A purpose to keep oneself uncontaminated is not enough. 
 There is needed the truly Christian identification of one's own 
 interests with those of others, with the interests of every har- 
 lot and of every girl who may yet be tempted, of every male 
 victim and of every boy who is in danger. 
 
 * It would be interesting if one could arrange in parallel columns the resolu- 
 tions of ecclesiastical assemblies with regard to marriage and divorce, and the 
 sermons and Sunday-school instruction upon the same subject within the same 
 comxaunions. It would be foimd, I surmise, that as yet the churches have 
 scarcely begim to use the power that they possess for preventing the evils that 
 they urge the state to rectify by legislation. 
 
THE FAMILY 225 
 
 Thus It IS that problems of personal purity open out into a 
 wide social perspective. They open out toward the family, 
 and toward all the economic conditions that depress its life; 
 they open out toward the causes that unduly postpone marriage; 
 to those that keep white slavery going — both the social and 
 economic causes that add to the force of instinct, and the polit- 
 ical causes that give power to the organization of vice. The 
 question is truly as wide as one's outlook for the race. The 
 question of the eugenic regulation of mating is, with all the rest, 
 a part of the problem of a possible democracy of God. In short, 
 religious education must deal with the whole sexual life as a 
 sphere for deliberate, constructive, social purpose. It must 
 instruct parents as to their part in unfolding these high and holy 
 things to their children. It must support the state and other 
 agencies in every enlightened effort to spread knowledge and 
 social standards. It must itself instruct, inspire, and train 
 the young with marriage and parenthood frankly in view, and 
 it must be ready to assist inexperienced parents with the best 
 knowledge that is anywhere available. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 THE CHURCH SCHOOL 
 
 Popular education is the central function of a churchp 
 
 If the church were simply a purveyor of spiritual goods, a sort 
 of "general store" of the soul, its educational work would not 
 necessarily involve much more than the training of the ministry. 
 But if the church is an agency for developing in the people a 
 certain sort of self-control, especially one that is difficult of 
 achievement, then popular education becomes a fundamental 
 ecclesiastical necessity. It is a necessity because of the inerad- 
 icable difference between the plasticity of childhood and the 
 relative fixity of maturity. True, maturity is only relatively 
 rigid; modifications of character occur at any age, and conver- 
 sions that reverse the whole current of life are scattered through 
 the history of the church. Our religion glories, and should 
 glory, in its power to rescue shipwrecked characters. But the 
 supreme test of its power lies in the prevention of wrecks. To 
 put the matter in terms of construction rather than in terms of 
 disaster, the predominant function of the church is to get 
 Christian motives into control of the growing powers of chil- 
 dren and youth. This function predominates in religion pre- 
 cisely as sanitation and hygiene predominate in matters of 
 public health. More than this, the educational function must 
 predominate in Christianity because of what Christianity is. 
 For: 
 
 (1) The church can maintain the spirit of prophecy within 
 itself only by educating the people. The priestly function of 
 di.spensing benefits can be handed on from priest to priest with- 
 out intervention of the people, but prophetic insight into life's 
 problems, and prophetic zeal for truly divine justice come 
 
 226 
 
THE CHURCH SCHOOL 227 
 
 "up from the burning core below," up from the "common" 
 people, not down from any privileged class. If the ministry 
 desires to avoid stagnation, let it keep close to the people; 
 yes, let it train the people to make great demands upon the 
 church. If the church is not to be a belated follower of the social 
 conscience, a sort of "me too" among philanthropic societies 
 and organizations for reform; if the church is to be a perpetual 
 inspiration to the human longing for a humane life, a perpetual 
 organ for the manifestation of the God of love — if this is to con- 
 stitute the very life of the church, then it must continuously 
 stimulate the fresh spirits of the young to make greater and 
 greater demands upon life. Not to keep human vitality in 
 prearranged grooves, but to enlarge its desires, widen its out- 
 look, make it more critical of things as they are, and more ready 
 to pay the cost of social reconstruction — this is religious educa- 
 tion upon the prophetic level. It involves of necessity ever- 
 renewed criticism of the church and of its ministry from the 
 standpoint of human need, and ever-recurring necessity for 
 inner reconstruction of ecclesiastical life and purpose. This 
 is what it means to maintain the spirit of prophecy. This 
 spirit is the divine love-impulse circulating upward from the 
 needs of the people, and pouring itself wherever it can into the 
 hearts of those who can help.^ 
 
 (2) Education of the people is an indispensable means for cor- 
 recting the faults of the church. Errors of learning, defects in 
 standards, and inefficiencies in methods, all require as their cor- 
 rective one or another sort of democratic judgment. Errors 
 in learning are corrected by the methods of science, which is 
 the democracy of the intellect. Scientific method spreads be- 
 fore the whole world every esoteric doctrine. Here hoary pre- 
 rogative has no standing; here every one must become as a 
 little child who gazes unabashed upon anything whatever, and 
 
 ' Id Is Christianity Practicable? (New York. 1916). William Adams Brown 
 has eiven striking evidence of this spiritual law of the chtirch's life. The 
 powerlessness of the churches everywhere to avert the present world calamity, 
 and the dominance of church consciousness by nationalistic assumptions in 
 all the warring countries, point back to failure to educate the commonalty 
 In the world outlook that is inherent in the Christian principle of brotherhood. 
 
228 THE CHURCH SCHOOL 
 
 tells without reserve what he has seen. The emancipation of 
 the church from its chief ancient errors with respect to the 
 Scriptures, for example, came about, not by exercising any self- 
 sufficient ecclesiastical prerogative, but by opening ecclesiastical 
 doors to democratic scientific methods that were already preva- 
 lent outside. 
 
 This represents a general law. The church can save itself 
 only by the help of those to whom it is sent; it has a vital in- 
 terest in stimulating them to the largest use of their native ca- 
 pacities. Even in respect to standards of conduct ecclesiastical 
 self-sufficiency is self-delusion. That the church's officially pro- 
 claimed standards can fall behind those of church members and 
 of outsiders we all know right well. It is necessary time and 
 again to convert the church as one step in a social reform. 
 Nor is this anomalous; it represents a law of the growth and 
 decay of institutions. Self -involution on the part of any insti- 
 tution involves decay of its social value. Granted that the 
 church is the inheritor of imperishable truth; does it follow 
 therefrom that she always understands and uses the riches that 
 are under her hand ? Nothing, in fact, but the cry of the people 
 for a richer life can keep her awake to the exliaustlessness of 
 the treasure that she carries. 
 
 If this is true of standards of conduct, how much more true is 
 it of methods of work. It is a trite remark that institutional 
 procedures that arise in response to a particular situation tend 
 to perpetuate themselves regardless of changes of situation, 
 and therefore regardless of efficiency. Institutions tend to 
 measure their duty by their own past performances. Hence 
 the necessity of popular judgments, unhampered by habit, by 
 vested interests, or by pride of official consistency. 
 
 Thus, on all accounts, the church needs a policy of unreserve 
 in religious education. Does some one suggest that the churches 
 are embarrassed at the present moment by popular criticism? 
 Or that religious education should therefore adopt a defensive 
 policy? The reply is that the danger to the churches from 
 the prevalent popular criticism arises from the fact that it is 
 not thoroughgoing enough; it demands too little of us, not too 
 
THE CHURCH SCHOOL 229 
 
 much ; it tends to beget In us a multitude of insignificant accom- 
 modations Instead of a more fundamental, more creative, pur- 
 pose. The social deficlences of the religious education of the 
 past are thus returning upon our own heads through the pal- 
 try demands that the people make upon the church. 
 
 (3) Through popular education the church makes its chief con- 
 tribution to the community life. What has just been said con- 
 cerns the maintenance and the Improvement of the church Itself 
 as an organ of divine inspiration. The conclusion that we have 
 reached may be summarily stated as follows: As it Is the char- 
 acter of God to give himself forth into human life, and as self- 
 forgetting service is the great law of individual vitality, so ecclesi- 
 astical institutions can escape instltutlonali^w only through the 
 influence of an awakened commonalty. The church must 
 educate the people, then, for the sake of its own perpetuity and 
 self- i mpro vement . 
 
 The power that the church should desire to have is power 
 to transform the common life, and this means the community. 
 Religious education must be outgoing as truly as foreign mis- 
 sions. " Come unto me," said Jesus, but when men had come 
 to him he said to them " Go." This Is the spirit of enlightened 
 Christian education. It seeks to lay upon pupils a mission. 
 It does. Indeed, say: "Come Into the church fellowship," but 
 it adds: "Let us go." There is no denying, however, that the 
 "Come" has been far more In evidence than the "Go." Re- 
 ligious education has had too prominently In mind membership 
 in the church, and not prominently enough membership in the 
 community. Both the church and the community have suf- 
 fered as a consequence. 
 
 But an awakening is upon us. As never before, proclama- 
 tions of the Christian religion as social reconstruction issue 
 from pulpits and from ecclesiastical assemblies. But these 
 proclamations are addressed for the most part to mature men 
 and women whose social habits are already formed, and whose 
 occupations and stations in life have already enmeshed them in 
 social unrighteousness. The most that can be expected directly 
 from these persons Is some amelioration of bad conditions. 
 
230 . THE CHURCH SCHOOL 
 
 To their children will be left the more basal parts of social re- 
 construction. Just here is where the church will make its chief 
 contribution to the common life — by providing a constant and 
 increasing supply of young people who have social outlook and 
 purpose before they cast their first vote, and before they enter 
 upon their life-occupations.^ 
 
 The idea of a department of education in the local religious 
 society. The clergy of to-day, if we may judge by conditions 
 that are prevalent in the churches, commonly look upon educa- 
 tion as an adjunct of the church, an appendix of the ministry, 
 which requires only such strength and such means as may be 
 left over after other things are attended to. If this looks like 
 a harsh judgment, test it by instituting a survey of the twenty 
 churches nearest to you, a survey that will compare expendi- 
 ture for religious education with expenditure for other things 
 in three respects: (a) Hours per week given to religious educa- 
 tion by salaried oJEcials as compared with hours given to other 
 interests; (6) A similar comparison of annual fiscal expenditure, 
 salaries included; (c) A comparison of the space used for re- 
 ligious education with that used for other purposes, a compari- 
 son that shall include both amount of room and degree of adap- 
 tation. 
 
 It would doubtless be unjust to charge any one with stupidity 
 in this matter. Ministers, like the rest of us, are made what 
 they are by social conditions. It is impossible, too, not to 
 sympathize with pastors upon whom there falls such a multi- 
 plicity of burdens that no strength is left for the improvement of 
 parish education. Yet it must be said that this heaping of 
 
 1 From the sporadic attempts at whirlwind reforms that one witnesses here 
 and there, one might suppose: (1) That social wrongs lilse the saloon, white 
 slavery, lonemployment, seven-day labor, child labor, poverty, and war, are 
 discontinuous parts of the social complex, each of which might be cleaned 
 up by itself once and for all. It is nob so. Social wrongs not only intertwine, 
 they are continuous with one another, like teeth, sesophagus, and stomach. 
 , (2) That, after certain reforms are accomplished, the church will be able to 
 devote itself wholly to its more particular work. Again, it is not so. The 
 particular work of the church is the radical transformation of society. The 
 fundamental difference between the church and other institutions is the 
 radical character of its social principle, a principle within which is included 
 Christianity 8 limitless hope for each individual. 
 
THE CHURCH SCHOOL 231 
 
 miscellaneous duties upon one another occurs because of the 
 lack of an adequate organizing principle for the pastoral office. 
 The question that needs to be answered is not, "How can I 
 possibly do more things?" but "What is my perspective? 
 Which things are large, and which ones small ? What is funda- 
 mental, and what accessory? Which sort of labor brings the 
 largest returns ? " 
 
 In view of present insight into the church's duty to the com- 
 munity, and in view of the agitation for religious education 
 that has been going on for years, one might say, without un- 
 charitableness, that the minister of the future will indeed be 
 stupid if he permits himself to be made a pack-horse, or an all- 
 'round handy man, when he is called of God to be a prophet. 
 The spirit of prophecy, when it comes among us, will doubtless 
 manifest itself in many ways, but one of them will surely be the 
 organization of genuine departments of religious education. 
 
 As a rule, departments of religious education do not yet exist 
 in our churches. Instead, we have a heap of unrelated organiza- 
 tions and activities — a Sunday school, a young people's society, 
 a junior society, clubs of boys and of girls, mission-study classes, 
 week-day religious instruction, classes of catechumens, sermons 
 to children, and, apart from them all, the isolated efforts of 
 church members at religious education in the home. The re- 
 sults are: 
 
 (a) Overlapping and duplication, as in Bible study or study of 
 missions. 
 
 (6) Gaps, such as: Lack of social or other activities appropriate 
 to a particular age, or to one sex at a particular age; lack of regular 
 educational procedures for inducting the young into full member- 
 ship in the church; lack of missionary training for one or another 
 group; lack of connection between all these activities and the 
 ordinary functions of laymen in the local society. At present the 
 fact that one has been trained in a Sunday school rarely guarantees 
 that he is fit for skilful churchmanship. 
 
 (c) Indefiniteness of purpose, and consequently lack of stand- 
 ards. Because the young people's society doesn't quite know 
 what place belongs to it in an educational scheme, the upper age 
 
232 THE CHURCH SCHOOL 
 
 limit is often left undefined, so that men and women of almost 
 any age are found among the "young" people. Moreover, many 
 a young people's society, instead of training its members in church- 
 manship, has become a competitor of the chiu'ch. Similarly, 
 clubs of various sorts pursue their way, according to chance con- 
 ditions or chance leadership, with little or no vital connection 
 with the church or with any distinctly religious purpose. The 
 Sunday school, in turn, not seldom assumes that it is efficient sim- 
 ply because the school machinery hums. That is, it compares 
 itself with itself instead of judging itself by the ascertained prog- 
 ress of its pupils toward some defined goal. The lack of a defined 
 goal subjects the school, further, to the whims of individuals. 
 For the same reason there is much jumping at fads, or standing 
 **pat" on already discredited methods. 
 
 (d) In a word, there is no guarantee that any person will re- 
 ceive genuine, continuous pastoral care through his childhood 
 and youth. 
 
 The gaps and the overlappings in a local society, or in a 
 denominational programme, can be graphically presented by 
 making a table like that shown on the opposite page. 
 
 The respective provisions for the two sexes may be made 
 still more graphic by using black ink for one, and red ink for 
 the other. The table here given is only a suggestion. In many 
 churches additional items would have to be inserted, and in 
 some cases a different division would be advisable. Thus, 
 church doctrine might be separated from church usages, or 
 usages and worship might be combined. If the conditions in 
 any church were adequately presented in the present table, the 
 following queries would arise: Why duplicate Bible instruc- 
 tion for just these ages; in fact, why duplicate at all? Does 
 instruction in church doctrine and usages begin early enough 
 and continue long enough? Does mission study begin early 
 enough, and why is there so much more for women than for 
 men? Why does tr ^ning in worship stop while the capacity 
 for worship is little more than infantile? Why is there train- 
 ing in giving for women and not for men, and why doesn't this 
 training run all the way through the Sunday school ? Why do 
 
THE CHURCH SCHOOL 
 
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234 THE CHURCH SCHOOL 
 
 men receive instruction and training in social righteousness 
 while women do not, and why are the socially important years 
 of early and middle adolescence left blank? In general, why 
 is middle adolescence less richly provided for than other ages? 
 Finally, is this church promoting and supervising home instruc- 
 tion and training? 
 
 A department of religious education, on the other hand, 
 would provide all-'round pastoral care for children. For, in 
 contrast to the present jumble of agencies, and the hit-or-miss 
 methods that are so common, it would have the following 
 features: 
 
 (a) It would include as pupils all the children and youth over 
 whom the church has oversight. 
 
 (6) It would include, and unify, everything done by the church 
 with these pupils. Labor would be economized by omitting use- 
 less activities and duplications, and by increased specialization 
 within the activities that remain. Every class, club, or society 
 that might be needed would then become a real organ of the cen- 
 tral purpose. 
 
 (c) Such a department would have for the whole a definite 
 plan, out of which, in connection with accumulating experience, 
 would grow definite standards and tests of the various organs and 
 procedures. Of the nature of standards and tests more will be 
 said presently. 
 
 (d) Because of this definiteness of purpose, of functions, of 
 standards, and of tests, specialized training would be provided 
 for the workers, and they would be appointed, transferred, pro- 
 moted, and relieved, on impersonal, educational grounds, not, as 
 happens so often at present, for personal considerations, some- 
 times even irrelevant ones.^ 
 
 (e) Such a unified whole would have unified supervision that 
 reaches to every part and to every activity. Somebody must 
 
 1 The smart that so many Sunday school teachers and oflBcers now feel 
 when they cannot have their own way is due in large measure to the fact that 
 irresponsibility has become a presumption of one's office. When there is 
 neither standard, nor test, nor supervision for my work, how can I help being 
 hurt when anybody else assumes authority over me? The way out of this 
 medley of arbitrary prerogatives, with the touchiness that results, is not 
 increase of arbitrary power, or more decisive use of it, as by a superintendent, 
 
THE CHURCH SCHOOL 235 
 
 know just what is happening, and must be competent and ready- 
 to assist any and every worker to do his best. 
 
 Wherein supervision consists. The proposal to establish 
 thorough supervision in religious education, and to appoint, 
 transfer, promote, and relieve teachers and officers solely on 
 the ground of efficiency will seem to many persons to involve 
 extreme difficulty. For supervision is popularly supposed to 
 imply one or more of these disagreeable things: Secret spy- 
 ing upon my work; concocting plans with respect to me behind 
 my back; subjecting mj^self to a boss who may not understand 
 my problems, or difficulties, or limitations; encountering fault- 
 finding, and possibly sarcasm, when I have done the best I 
 know how. If such fears were well founded, supervision would 
 be essentially anarchy — the anarchy that lurks in every autoc- 
 racy. Teachers are justified in being sensitive at this point; 
 no foreign invasion of their work or of their personal dignity 
 can be justified. But supervision, properly understood, is the 
 exact opposite of the wrongs that are feared. Thus: 
 
 (1) Siipermsion is sharing the burdens, and the blame, that 
 might otherwise fall upon an isolated individual. One of the 
 worst vices of the traditional Sunday school is that it isolates 
 the worker with his work. How few teachers and officers 
 can say: "There is one person who understands my problems 
 and difficulties, is ever ready to help me wdth them, and if 
 things go wrong will share with me the responsibility for the 
 error"! As a matter of fact, the gibes to which Sunday school 
 teachers have been subjected in recent years have been made 
 possible, for the most part, by lack of supervision. If a pastor 
 or a director of religious education were known to be impli- 
 cated in the faults that seem worthy of castigation, he would 
 
 but the exaltation of impersonal educational standards — standards sufficiently 
 technical to do honor to those who attain them, without dishonoring those 
 who do not. Besides, when a church as a whole takes religious education 
 in a suflBciently serious way, the very largeness of the problem sobers those 
 who realize what is happening. It is then possible to appeal to the deeper 
 religious motives of the workers — motives that will make one glad to have 
 the best possible work done, and even, out of loyalty, to acquiesce in decisions 
 the wisdom of which one doubts. 
 
236 THE CHURCH SCHOOL 
 
 be the more shining mark for the darts of scorn, or at least his 
 share in the chagrin would make the teacher's share easier to 
 bear. Simple fairness requires some stated provision whereby 
 each worker may talk over his problems with some other person 
 who will take the trouble to understand them and to assist in 
 solving them. This conception of the matter puts upon the 
 supervisor, on the other hand, an obligation to co-operate 
 understandingly and sympathetically with each worker — to 
 make him succeed if this is possible. The supervisor is not to 
 be a slave-driver, or a mere task-setter, or a mere measurer and 
 appraiser; he Is not to be outside the work at all, but inside it; 
 he is to be "touched with the feeling of our infirmities," having 
 been "in all points tempted like as we are." 
 
 (2) Supervision limits the arbitrariness of every worker, the 
 supervisor himself included. Supervision does Imply that I 
 surrender my arbitrary will in every detail of my work, but that 
 to which I surrender Is not another arbitrary will, but the com- 
 mon cause. Moreover, every other worker does the same, so 
 that we meet one another upon a truly democratic basis. Every 
 one is to take this humble position. 
 
 Probably no workers receive less supervisory assistance than 
 Sunday school superintendents, though in the nature of their 
 work no one needs it more. Their duties are complicated, to 
 begin with. Administration, conduct of worship, selection and 
 supervision of teachers — all these fall to their lot. For lack of 
 supervision the best powers of many a superintendent are 
 never called into use. Lack of supervision means isolation. 
 Having no one to go to with his problems, and no one to show 
 him his faults or how to improve, he stumbles along, forms 
 habits of stumbling, becomes set in his ways, and very likely 
 arbitrary. There are many superintendents who think of 
 themselves as specialists in Sunday school work, whereas they 
 are merely mechanized. Again, the many superintendents who 
 assume that they have a sort of prescriptive right to their office, 
 those who are ready to make a row if they are deposed, most 
 of the martinets and the autocrats, are victims of the injustice 
 that is inherent in every unsupervised school. They have been 
 
THE CHURCH SCHOOL 237 
 
 made what they are by the situation in which the votes of others 
 have placed them. Gradually, gently, irresponsible superin- 
 tendents must be made over into responsible ones, or else dis- 
 placed. The same principle applies to the pastor and the 
 director of religious education. 
 
 The fundamental idea in supervision is intimate sharing in 
 burden-bearing. This implies that the group of workers is of 
 the deliberative sort. Every one has a right to be heard. 
 Every one has the duty of making available the facts that only 
 he knows; every one's experience contains some illumination; 
 every one must form judgments of his own as a part of his con- 
 tribution to the common enterprise, and these judgments must 
 concern, in some measure, the acts of the supervisor himself. 
 He will make a serious blunder if he assumes to be a self- 
 sufficient fountain of either wisdom or executive power. For 
 he will almost certainly discredit himself by his obvious falli- 
 bility, and even if, by personal attractiveness or by sheer energy, 
 he gets himself accepted at his own valuation, the result will be 
 a mechanized school which, lacking the unity and the self- 
 perpetuating capacity of a living organism, will fall to pieces 
 when his hand is withdrawn. The way of the wise supervisor 
 is that of humble seeking for light; it is that of openness of pur- 
 pose, and great frankness with every worker; it is that of spread- 
 ing his own policies and acts before the staff of workers so that 
 they may not only be instructed but also become his instructors. 
 
 (3) Supervision implies that there is a definite organ for main- 
 taining the unity of the school. The present isolation of the 
 worker not only increases his own burdens, it adds to the 
 burdens of others also. Take as an example the problem of 
 cultivating reverence in pupils. The conduct of a pupil in the 
 common worship of the school often depends upon the attitude 
 and the habits of his teacher. The thoughtless influence of 
 many a tardy, inattentive, disorderly teacher pulls against the 
 superintendent's efforts to lead the children into a worshipful 
 frame of mind. On the other hand, cases are not lacking in 
 which a superintendent's slam-bang ways in the assembly of 
 the school beget irreverence that the teacher cannot over- 
 
238 THE CHURCH SCHOOL 
 
 come. Consider, likewise, the burdens that teachers must 
 bear because of poor work done in lower grades. The fact is 
 that the parts of a school are interdependent, whether we plan 
 to have them so or not. But interdependence is not the same 
 as unity. Nor is unity achieved even by having a common 
 pm*pose in all the parts unless the community of the purpose be 
 specifically represented in some official who acts upon every 
 part from the standpoint of wholeness. The supervisor is, in 
 fact, the organ whereby the school assures itself of a system of 
 religious education. 
 
 (4) Supervision develops standards of educational efficiency 
 for every office. The very fact that a school has a supervisor 
 should mean emphasis upon results, or efficiency, as distinguished 
 from going through certain movements. For example, the office 
 of secretary will involve not only filling in certain blank spaces 
 in record books, but also such use of the records as helps to 
 educate the pupils. The secretary will be, in his own way, an 
 educator. A long vista of attractive possibilities opens up for 
 this ordinarily prosaic office — a vista of analyses that shall 
 show the strong and the weak points in the school; reports that 
 shall stimulate pupils, teachers, parents, and the church board; 
 exhibits that shall be a tonic for everybody. Similarly, the 
 office of the teacher in each grade will consist primarily in pro- 
 ducing certain ascertainable results in pupils — not in saying 
 certain things, not in "going over" certain pages in a text- 
 book. So it will be through the whole school. The superin- 
 tendent, as well as his colleagues, will be answerable for pro- 
 ducing definable educational effects in pupils. Not " What have 
 you done?" but "What have you got done?" will be the 
 primary question for each. 
 
 When each office comes to be defined thus by its educational 
 function, then and then only the person who holds the office 
 is put into true perspective. We have then the antidote for 
 the substitution of personal attractiveness for skill; we have 
 the corrective for both faddishness and traditionalism; and we 
 undermine every claim to hold an office as a personal perquisite. 
 Here is the beginning of the cure for discontinuity of work 
 
THE CHURCH SCHOOL 239 
 
 through changes of personnel. As long as the present fogginess 
 of standards prevails, we must expect that, as workers come and 
 go, there will be interruptions and disruptions of function. But 
 clearly understood standards, administered by a recognized 
 supervisor, will tend to stabilize the whole school, and to pro- 
 duce continuity of life at every point. 
 
 (5) Supervision develops tests of efficiency. A standard is 
 some point that we set out to reach within a given time; a test 
 is any fact by which we can judge whether we have moved 
 toward this point, and how far we have moved. If the standard 
 is that every teacher should be on time every Sunday of the 
 year, the test is the facts of attendance counted one by one 
 each Sunday. If a standard for the fourth grade is that each 
 pupil should by the end of the year know the Bible stories up 
 to the David cycle, then the test is some piece or pieces of work 
 done by each pupil in which he uses these stories. ^ If a standard 
 of the secondary department is that every pupil, as far as pos- 
 sible, should be brought into full or confirmed membership 
 in the church by the age of sixteen, then the test will include, in 
 addition to counting those who are and those who are not in 
 this relation to the church by the age of sixteen, such a study 
 of each remaining outsider as will reveal why he remains out- 
 side. Only so can we judge whether the obstacle was or was 
 not removable by our efforts. 
 
 The distinction between standards and tests is important. 
 For high standards do not of themselves prove much as to the 
 effectiveness of the work that is actually done. Many a worker, 
 in fact, deceives himself by measuring the quality of his work by 
 the motives with which it is done, or by the hopes that are en- 
 tertained for it. There is no end to the possibilities of bungling 
 on the part of those who mean well. Generally the standard 
 itself is somewhat hazy until tests are devised, so that standards 
 
 1 This is not the same as saying that an examination is necessary, at least 
 if "examination" is used in the ordinary sense. The formaUstic examina- 
 tion that still lingers in day schools and colleges bears witness, not to thorough- 
 ness of teaching in these institutions, but to a low level of teaching methods. 
 Here and there a Simday school needs to be warned against adopting in 
 religious teaching the defective methods that progressive educators are strug- 
 gling to put aux end to in other schools. 
 
240 THE CHURCH SCHOOL 
 
 and tests, though they are distinct, are practically reciprocal. 
 The tabular view on the oppsite page will suggest the rela- 
 tions here involved, and also some general notions of the sorts 
 of standard and of test that will be found appropriate in a 
 church department of education. 
 
 Most of the theory that underlies this table has already been 
 stated. The proposal to utilize in administration all the avail- 
 able powers of pupils may, however, need a word of explana- 
 tion. Let us recall, then, two features of the outlook that we 
 have already reached. The first is that the basal process in 
 the teaching of religion is social experience on the Christian 
 plane, or common purposeful life on the part of teacher and 
 pupil. The second is that we are to educate for democracy. 
 These two principles taken together imply that the ideal school 
 is not the one in which there is an impervious governing class 
 placed over the class of the governed, but the one in which 
 there is no plane of separation at all between the governors and 
 the governed. That is, though diversity of function must 
 exist, so that one person uses his judgment in one sphere, an- 
 other in another, children themselves at all ages have real func- 
 tions in school management. Alternatives are constantly to 
 be provided, and the choice of pupils between such alternatives 
 is to be final. 
 
 By the time pupils reach the secondary school age they are 
 experienced enough to form a student council made up of 
 representatives from their various classes. Such a council, as 
 experience has already shown, may well consider, and in many 
 cases settle, serious problems. When such a body is not a 
 make-believe one, devised by adults simply for getting pupils 
 to accept what has already been decided, but a body that is 
 seriously consulted and really used for improving policies and 
 methods, the members of it show surprising capacity — surprising 
 to any one brought up under a contrary type of education — 
 for appreciating the purposes of the school and for contributing 
 ^ valuable element to the administration of it. 
 
 Relation of the families of the church to the church school. 
 Thus far I have spoken of the department of religious educa- 
 
THE CHURCH SCHOOL 
 
 241 
 
 Standards 
 
 AND 
 
 Tests 
 
 FOR THE 
 
 Church 
 School 
 
 Standards 
 AND Tests 
 
 OF 
 
 Ultimatp: 
 Results 
 
 Standards 
 AND Tests 
 
 OF 
 
 Proximate 
 Results 
 
 The Standard: Progress of the Democracy of God, 
 Progress being Defined from time to time by the 
 Right Settlement of Specific Social Problems. 
 
 The Test: Statistics of Social Conditions, includ- 
 ing the Church and Missions, our own Local Com- 
 munity, and the Larger Society— Nation and World. 
 
 The Standard: Intelligent Consecration of Every 
 Pupil, according to his Capacity, to the Christian 
 Purpose, which is promotion of the Democracy of 
 God. 
 
 The Test: Varies with the Age of the Pupil. With 
 Younger Pupils, Observation of Conduct by Parents 
 and Teachers; with Older Pupils, Activities in 
 Church and Community. "By their Fruits." 
 
 The Standard: The Principles of Teach- 
 ing as Scientifically Determined. 
 
 Standards 
 AND Tests 
 
 OF 
 
 Process 
 
 Teaching 
 
 Organi- 
 zation 
 
 Adminis- 
 tration 
 
 The Test: Observation of the Teacher's 
 Work by the Supervisor, and Self-obser- 
 vation by the Teacher, with written 
 Reports. 
 
 The Standard: (i) Every Function of a 
 School of Religion to be Definitely 
 Assigned to some Individual. (2) Econ- 
 omy of Human Energy by Avoidance of 
 Duplications and of Useless Enterprises. 
 (3) All Work to be Supervised. 
 
 The Test: (i) Comparison with other 
 Schools, Religious and Secular. (2) 
 The History and Theory of Religious Edu- 
 cation. (3) Direct Study of Results of 
 this School. Hence an Adequate System 
 of Records and Reports. 
 
 The Standard: (i) All Available Power to 
 be Utilized, including Powers of Pupils. 
 (2) All Workers to be Trained. Pro- 
 vision to be made for Growth after 
 Formal Training has Ended. (3) Selec- 
 tion, Promotion, etc., on Basis of Efii- 
 ciency only. (4) Search for the Best; 
 Experimental Attitude; Readiness to 
 Improve. (5) Humane, Co-operative 
 Relations between all Persons Involved. 
 Expressions of Appreciation. 
 
 The Test: (i) Annual Report from Each 
 Worker upon His Own Part of the Work. 
 (2) Annual Summaries and Statistical 
 Exhibits that show where both Strength 
 and Weakness lie. (3) Democratic 
 Coimcil of Workers for Digesting this 
 Knowledge and Planning Improvements. 
 
242 THE GHURCH SCHOOL 
 
 tion, or church school, as though it comprised only the activi- 
 ties that have their centre in the church building. But a 
 broader conception is possible and necessary. All members of 
 the church who have growing children should be accounted 
 members of the staff of instructors, accounted so not merely in 
 sentiment, but also administratively. Upon the birth of the 
 first child the parents' names should be recorded as teachers, 
 just as the child's name should be recorded as a pupil in the 
 Cradle Roll or Font Roll department. And not until all their 
 living children have graduated from the church school should 
 the names of such parents be dropped from the roll of teachers. 
 In the meantime they should be given continuous supervision; 
 they should make annual reports just as other teachers and all 
 officers should do; and training classes and departmental staff 
 meetings should be provided.^ 
 
 The evils of isolation are nowhere more in evidence than in 
 the semichaotic condition of religious education in church 
 families. Here are multitudes of parents who would like to 
 know how to rear their children to be Christians, but no one 
 tells them how. The chief trouble is not that knowledge on this 
 point is limited (as it certainly is), but that there is no organized 
 method of spreading the knowledge that is available. And 
 one reason why our knowledge on this point is so limited is that 
 there is no organized method of observing and recording the 
 experience of families. Beginnings of the right kind have been 
 made in the distribution of material by the superintendents of 
 
 J In my own thinking, what is here suggested has its place in a compre- 
 hensive conception of a working church. The notion of a church as a con- 
 gregation to be talked to, or as a fellowship in anything that does not include 
 co-operative labor, does not of itself go far enough. What does it mean to 
 the people themselves that they are members of churches? Doubtless it 
 means refraining from certain sorts of wrong conduct, going to chm-ch, and 
 leading a life of prayer. It ought to mean, in addition, a specific, defined, and 
 supervised sphere of labor for the promotion of the democracy of God. Is it 
 too much to hope that the time will yet come when every member will be 
 recorded in the books of the church as a worker in a certain department; 
 ' when each of these departments will have plans and policies that bear speci- 
 fically, not in any merely generic and hazy way, upon actual conditions that 
 confront its members; when businesslike supervision will be provided for 
 every worker; when every worker will render regular reports of his activities, 
 and when progress or decline in his department will be annually ascertained 
 and recorded ? This, I conceive, fairly represents what the church is here for. 
 
THE CHURCH SCHOOL 243 
 
 Cradle Roll and Font Roll departments, and in the holding 
 of parents' meetings and parents' classes in various Sunday 
 schools. But these are only a drop in the bucket; they are 
 only a mild palliation of an enormous waste. 
 
 The problem of getting time enough for effective religious 
 education. When present inefficiencies are pointed out, few 
 remarks are more common than this : " Well, how much can you 
 expect from a half -hour's instruction once a week? We must 
 have more time." Thereupon there is casting about for either 
 some method of getting religious instruction into the public 
 schools, or for establishing week-day religious instruction by the 
 churches themselves. The problem is a real and pressing one, 
 and it is not less serious than it seems to be; yet the time- 
 situation as a whole has never yet, I believe, been correctly 
 analyzed in print. Reserving for a subsequent chapter the 
 relations of state education to religion, let me describe in blunt 
 fashion the present situation within the churches. 
 
 (1) The churches are wasting a large proportion of the precious 
 half-hour for religious instruction on Sunday. They are wasting 
 it by curtailing it for trivial causes, such as speeches by strangers, 
 a superintendent's dawdling, the intervention of unimportant 
 "special occasions"; by interruptions, as by the secretary; by 
 unnecessary distractions; and by failure to supervise the teacher 
 or to train him so as to get the best possible work from him. 
 
 (2) It is not true that only a half-hour is available for religious 
 instruction on Sunday. In most Sunday schools the period 
 for class instruction could be lengthened fifteen minutes by 
 adding to it the time that is now wasted or ill used. The school 
 begins late, protracts the opening exercises without reason, 
 makes clumsy transitions because system and team-work are 
 weak, and takes the time of the general session for various 
 things that could be attended to at least as well otherwise. 
 To test the applicability of this analysis to your school, take 
 your watch in hand for a few Sundays, and write down the 
 number of minutes spent upon each procedure, being sure to 
 include any items like those mentioned in the preceding sen- 
 tence; then write out your judgment as to the time needed. 
 
^ 
 
 244 THE CHURCH SCHOOL 
 
 on educational grounds, for each of these procedures. Was 
 the prayer too long, or not long enough? Did the super- 
 intendent do any unnecessary talking ? Etc., etc. 
 
 (3) Every minute of the Sunday school, not merely the class 
 period, shoidd be made educationally effective. Why talk as if 
 church education were shut up to a bare half -hour, when per- 
 haps thrice this time is already available ? Our greatest weak- 
 ness is not lack of time, after all, but lack of effectiveness in the 
 use of what we have. 
 
 (4) It has not been demonstrated that a longer Sunday session 
 is impracticable. We need experiments with, say, a two-hour 
 session, which shall include, besides a period for worship and 
 one for recitation, a period for study (under supervision), and 
 a period for planning and administering enterprises of social 
 helpfulness. 
 
 (5) When week-day instruction is entered upon, as it must 
 probably be sooner or later, it should be an organic part of a general 
 plan for the church school, and there should be unified administra- 
 tion. That is to say, the time problem is not an isolated one. 
 The question whether we ought to have more time is bound 
 up with the question of what we would do with it if we had it. 
 Agitation for week-day instruction has only too often proceeded 
 as if, granted the time, we would be ready to go ahead, whereas 
 such matters as the content and method of instruction and the 
 relation thereof to the Sunday instruction, and the whole prob- 
 lem of administration have hardly begun to be considered. 
 Nor has the problem of securing competent teachers for week- 
 day classes even approached a solution as yet.^ I would not 
 imply that these problems must all be worked out in advance of 
 experiment, but only that any experiment that is made should 
 proceed from a competent grasp of educational principles. We 
 should hesitate, we should refuse, to establish another isolated, 
 
 , falsely self-sufficient agency. 
 
 (6) The problem of securing a sufficient proportion of the pupil's 
 
 *I have presented concrete instances of these problems in "A General 
 View of the Movement for Correlating Religious Education with Public In- 
 struction." — Religious Education XI (1916), 109-122. 
 
THE CHURCH SCHOOL 245 
 
 time is bound up icith that of securing a sujjicient 'proportion of the 
 teacher's time, and this problem is bound up, in turn, with the in- 
 justices of our economic order. We should not put ourselves in 
 the position of asking for additional time in which to do poor 
 teaching; but when we ask for more of the teacher's time in 
 order that he may fit himself for more skilful work, we confront, 
 in a great proportion of cases, the grim fact of economic pressure 
 so great as to leave insufficient time and energy for the necessary 
 study. A large part of the work of religious education is being 
 done at the present moment with only the fag ends of human 
 energy. All honor to the housekeepers, the factory operatives, 
 the stenographers, the salespeople, and the bookkeepers who are 
 giving a considerable proportion of their free time to uncom- 
 pensated and often unhonored labor in the Sunday school. 
 Many of them are bravely, but with great handicaps, struggling 
 to secure adequate training for their work. The spectacle is 
 more noble than it is pathetic. But most of all it is a challenge 
 to the church to realize how her very life is being drained by 
 the economic order against which she has only feebly protested. 
 The long working day, and the high-pressure methods that now 
 prevail are not necessary to feed, clothe, house, and educate 
 all the people, nor are the products of the people's industry 
 distributed upon any such principle. Let us face the fact that 
 the great problem of time in religious education is identical 
 with the problem of the consumption of the time of the many 
 in heaping up possessions for the few. 
 
 The financial support of the church schooL That the 
 church school should be supported by the church should be 
 rather obvious from the principles that have been stated. 
 There are two great objections to the common practice of pay- 
 ing the expenses of the school by collections of money from its 
 pupils: First, the pupils' contributions can be made far more 
 educative by a different plan, and, second, when the school pays 
 its own expenses the church lacks an important reminder of its 
 function as religious educator, and is practically invited to let 
 the school go its own way. Let us consider these two points 
 in reverse order. 
 
246 THE CHURCH SCHOOL 
 
 Having the school regularly in the church budget is more 
 than a matter of paying bills. It is an outward and visible 
 sign of the church's inward and spiritual comprehension of its 
 central task. Something is gained when the school merely 
 appears along with the minister, the janitor, the choir, the coal 
 man, and the insurance agent. But the relative amounts 
 appropriated for these various items reveal something of im- 
 portance. Here is a church with a budget of twenty thousand 
 dollars for local expenditures that appropriates for its Sunday 
 school the same amount that it pays to one janitor, namely, 
 seven hundred and fifty dollars.^ This is one-fifth of the amount 
 appropriated for church music. A budget like this is a veritable 
 window into the local ecclesiastical mind. Well-to-do churches 
 are buying for their Sunday schools printed matter that is 
 educationally as well as commercially cheap. There are 
 wealthy churches that "cannot afford" to employ a director 
 of religious education, and when the payment of teachers is 
 suggested ask: "Will not paying the teacher interfere with the 
 spirituality of his work?" We need, then, for the sake of the 
 church as a whole to keep the Sunday school in the church 
 budget, and to keep on increasing the appropriation until the 
 church wakes up to the greatness of its task. 
 
 On the other hand, the pupils in the school need to be trained 
 in giving. Ordinarily, it appears, the "authorities of the 
 school" decide where the pupils' money shall go, and then 
 approach the pupils with little more than "Give, give!" One 
 child is reported to have been under the delusion that he was 
 giving to his teacher ! Real training in giving requires : (a) 
 Intelligence as to the object for which money is solicited. 
 (6) Comparison of one object with another so as to judge how 
 money should be apportioned between them, (c) Free choice 
 
 1 It is to be assumed, of course, that a part of the salary of both pastor and 
 janitor, and a part of the expenditure usually listed under lighting, heating, 
 insurance, repairs, etc., are devoted to religious education. But even when 
 these are added (.to the item for the Sunday school the total bears no fitting 
 relation to the fundamental place and the proper cost of religious education. 
 It would be well for every church to make a budget that woxild show for whom 
 (children or adults) all moneys are appropriated. 
 
THE CHURCH SCHOOL 247 
 
 between alternatives, (d) The development of co-operation 
 in judging causes and in supporting them, (e) Continuity, 
 the habit of giving, sustained loyalty to a cause. (/) A report 
 to the giver as to what has been done with his contributions, 
 and what they have accomplished. 
 
 The pupils in the church school should be led, in accordance 
 with these principles, to support the local church, to give to 
 missions and other church enterprises, and to support philan- 
 thropies. To exploit a school in the interest of a financial 
 need, to "work" it as a source of increased revenues, to play 
 upon children's untrained sympathies and impulses — this is 
 degradation. Every financial transaction in which a pupil 
 takes part should be educative to him. If we seek first this 
 educational righteousness, we need have no fears that the 
 contributions of the pupils will be niggardly, but if we do not 
 train them thus to intelligent, discriminating, systematic giv- 
 ing, we need not be surprised if they make crotchety and un- 
 generous givers in maturity.^ 
 
 1 These principles may be worked out by various methods. The dupli- 
 cate envelope system offers a great advance over traditional ways, but much 
 more than the envelope is needed. I look forward to a time when every 
 church will report all its receipts and expenditures to the pupils in the Sunday 
 school, and when the great church societies also will give an account of their 
 stewardship to the learners. In the Union School of Religion each class has 
 its own treasury, out of which it votes its contributions after studying various 
 causes. These contributions fall into two classes, those made to causes that 
 the school as a whole is helping to support, such as a missionary enterprise 
 and a local philanthropy, and those whicli the class itself, with the help (but 
 never the dictation) of the teacher, chooses as its particular sphere of help- 
 fulness. When a class gives a contribution to one of the general causes, 
 the class treasurer pays over the amount to the school treasurer. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 EDUCATIONAL RELATIONS BETWEEN STATE 
 AND CHURCH 
 
 "''The social significance of the modem secular state. 
 
 The term "secular state" is here used as the most convenient 
 designation for a pohtical society in which organized religion 
 as well as individual rehgious attitude is an altogether vol- 
 untary matter. This implies, of course, that the financial 
 support of organized religion is voluntary, not a matter of 
 taxation, which is a form of legal compulsion. 
 
 The tendency of modern states to become secular is unmis- 
 takable. First, the civil power, refusing to accept dictation 
 from the ecclesiastical power, holds itself to be co-ordinate 
 therewith. Next, the state takes over ecclesiastical functions 
 of many kinds, such as charities and education. Disestablish- 
 ment follows, and finally even patronage is withdrawn. Only 
 "free churches" then remain — free in the same sense as a 
 literary society or a golf -club. 
 
 This growing separation of church from state is a phase of 
 the growth of popular government. The necessity that such 
 government should have an intelligent electorate has caused it to 
 assume the duty of educating all the people. Here, more than 
 anywhere else, we shall find the nerve of the secular state. 
 Here civil society procreates itself, so to say, in the thought and 
 the conscience of children. Just here is where the separation of 
 the churches from the taxing power is most difficult in both 
 theory and practice. Long after disestablishment occurs, the 
 two powers remain entangled in the matter of education. 
 
 If we desire a disentanglement that shall be in the interest 
 of a socially adequate education, we must look at the state 
 school itself (which we of the United States commonly call the 
 
 248 
 
STATE AND CHURCH 249 
 
 "public" school) as an expression of certain great social aspira- 
 tions. We must realize, to begin with, that the secularization of 
 the state, and therefore of state schools, has been necessitated 
 chiefly by the social inadequacy of ecclesiastical traditions and 
 practices. The state, not the church, has been the decisive 
 defender and guarantor of fundamental liberties, such as the 
 right to think, to speak, to associate with one's fellows, and 
 to stand before courts of law as the equal of any citizen. The 
 conception of indefeasible rights, which no authority, whether 
 it speaks in the name of man or of God, may abridge — this 
 conception may almost be said to have given birth to the modern 
 state. 
 
 The free state, moreover, rather than any church, has been 
 the chief practical realization of the unity and the solidarity 
 of men. The Jews, for example, becoming free citizens, find 
 in the state a human recognition that the dominant religion of 
 the western world had never, in any of its main branches, 
 accorded to them. The great mixer of races m this country 
 has been the civic rather than the ecclesiastical community, 
 and before all else the public school. 
 
 Without doubt what is humane and democratic in the 
 modern state owes a large part of its inspiration to religion. 
 Within Christianity from the days of Jesus there has been 
 the leaven of democracy. Though this leaven has been for the 
 most part, to use Jesus' own word, "hidden," there has ap- 
 peared from time to time evidence that the germ is not dead. 
 Not only have individuals here and there seen and declared the 
 incompatibility of the spirit of Jesus with all oppression, ex- 
 ploitation, and denial of equality of opportunity, but minor 
 groups of many sorts have endeavored to live the brotherhood 
 that they professed, and some phases of liberty have been 
 espoused by whole denominations. On the other hand, many 
 a prophet of the rights of men has been an " infidel," and cer- 
 tainly the secular state has actually brought men together as 
 no religious organization has done. 
 
 One might maintain, with considerable show of reason, that 
 the socially integrative power of religion has passed to the state. 
 
250 STATE AND CHURCH 
 
 / even the secular state. During the rise of popular government, 
 ^-^'the populace has been divided on religious grounds, divided 
 not only as respects the great historic religions of the world — 
 Christianity, Judaism, etc. — but divided also into apparently 
 irreconcilable parties within the dominant religion. Indeed, 
 so bitter has been religious partisanship at times that the civil 
 power has had to step in to preserve the peace. Religion has 
 had to be protected from religion by the secular arm. On the 
 other hand, the secular power has had to guard against allow- 
 ing its prerogatives or its funds to come under the control of 
 one or another religious party. 
 
 In short, then, the secular state, particularly in its schools, 
 is our highest social achievement in these two respects: (1) 
 The securing of freedom and equal rights for individuals, and 
 (2) The organization of authority upon the basis of manhood 
 rather than upon the basis of hereditary or other class privilege. 
 That we are still at the beginnings in both these matters is 
 clear enough. Even fundamental rights are not too secure as 
 yet, and the spirit of democracy is still engaged in the struggle 
 against privilege. But we have definitely entered upon the 
 struggle, and we have entered upon it specifically as members of 
 the secular state. 
 
 Why the public schools in the United States are increas- 
 ingly secular. In the District of Columbia, the territories, 
 the Indian reservations, and the insular possessions, public 
 education comes under the provision of the Federal Constitu- 
 tion that forbids the Congress to make any law concerning an 
 establishment of religion. The full force of this prohibition was 
 not at first recognized, for government funds were appropriated 
 for the support of Indian schools under the control of religious 
 bodies, some Catholic, some Protestant. From this patronage 
 of churches, however, the government has already partly with- 
 drawn, and complete withdrawal is in sight. 
 
 In the States of the Union public education is under State 
 control, and is therefore not subject to the federal prohibition 
 of an established church. Some of the oldest States had at 
 the outset of their history what amounted practically to a State 
 
STATE AND CHURCH 251 
 
 church. But they have moved away from such entanglements, 
 and the younger States have commonly begun their career with 
 constitutional bars against them. At the present time the 
 separation of the state from the church is axiomatic through- 
 out the Union. 
 
 But the application of the axiom to the public schools has 
 not been easy or uniform. The constitutions, the statutes, the 
 court decisions, and the administrative precedents of the differ- 
 ent States differ greatly from one another. Nevertheless, a 
 general trend, an unambiguous one, is discernible: The States 
 participate less and less in anything that is specifically recog- 
 nized by the people as religion. 
 
 Before we ask for the reasons of this trend, let us glance at a 
 single specimen of the change in question. The Ordinance for 
 the Government of the Northwest Territory, promulgated in 
 17S7, that is, the territory northwest of the Ohio River, con- 
 tains this clause: "Religion, morality, and knowledge being 
 necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, 
 schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.'* 
 Here, it is clear, the state has the distinct intention of teaching 
 religion, or of seeing that it is taught. But the constitutions 
 of the States that were carved out of this territory show a pro- 
 gressive modification of this intention until, in some instances, 
 no trace of it is left. 
 
 The first modification is in the constitution of Ohio, which 
 was adopted in 1802: "ReHgion, morality, and knowledge be- 
 ing essentially necessary to the good government and happiness 
 of mankind, schools and the means of instruction shall forever 
 be encouraged by legislative provision, not inconsistent with the 
 rights of conscience." In 1851 the statement is changed still 
 further: "Religion, morality, and knowledge being essential 
 to good government, it shall be the duty of the general assem- 
 bly to pass suitable laws to protect every religious denomination 
 in the peaceable enjoyment of its own mode of public worship, 
 and to encourage schools and the means of instruction.'' Thus, 
 first the rights of conscience are brought in as a limitation; 
 then the ground of the provision is narrowed to the needs of 
 
252 STATE AND CHURCH 
 
 good government, no reference being made to any other value 
 in religion; finally, the duty imposed changes from encouraging 
 schools in which religion shall be promoted to protecting re- 
 ligious denominations in their own modes of worship. 
 
 Indiana puts into her constitution in 1816 only this shred 
 of the original statement in the Ordinance of 1787, "Knowl- 
 edge and learning generally diffused through a community be- 
 ing essential to the preservation of a free government," fol- 
 lowed by regulations respecting school lands. In 1851 the 
 statement is changed to read as follows: "Knowledge and 
 learning generally diffused throughout a community being 
 essential to the preservation of a free government, it shall be 
 the duty of the general assembly to encourage, by all suitable 
 means, moral, intellectual, scientific, and agricultural improve- 
 ment." Michigan in 1850 makes the list still briefer: "The 
 legislature shall encourage the promotion of intellectual, scien- 
 tific, and agricultural improvement." The various constitu- 
 tions of Illinois have no trace of the original declaration of 1787. 
 The Minnesota constitution, 1857, declares: "The stability 
 of a republican form of government depending mainly upon 
 the intelligence of the people, it shall be the duty of the legis- 
 lature to establish a general and uniform system of public 
 schools." Here at last not even morality is mentioned, and 
 intelligence is declared to be the main support of republican in- 
 stitutions. 
 
 Though these items cover only one phase of the movement 
 in a limited part of the country, the impression that they con- 
 vey of a change toward secularism correctly represents a general 
 shift in most of the States of the North and West. What is the 
 explanation? Not any general decline of religion during this 
 period, but the clash of competing religious bodies between 
 which the States determined to be neutral. If the teaching of 
 religion in the public schools produces a wrangling community 
 or school district, the State follows the clear dictate of practical 
 wisdom when it removes the divisive object out of the schools. 
 The whole experiment in popular government would be im- 
 perilled if the schools should become class schools. They must 
 be, at all cost, schools of the whole people. 
 
STATE AND CHURCH 253 
 
 A convenient example of the practical logic that has just 
 been referred to is the contest between Catholics and Protes- 
 tants over public school funds in the State of New York in the 
 forties. In the law of 1813, which established a system of pub- 
 lic instruction, there was a clause that provided for distributing 
 the funds for the City of New York among benevolent, religious, 
 and educational associations that maintained charity schools. 
 As a result, some eight or ten religious societies received sub- 
 sidies. In 1824 the legislature gave to the common council 
 of the city authority to designate the societies that should 
 thus share in the public funds. The scheme produced con- 
 stant friction, particularly because the Catholics felt that 
 they did not secure their proper share. A chief Protestant 
 beneficiary was the "Public School Society," which maintained 
 what amounted to a chain of public schools without public 
 supervision. The Catholics desired to be put substantially 
 upon a parity with this society. A petition addressed to the 
 common council failed after a long debate. An attempt to 
 secure relief through the legislature likewise failed. At last 
 the question was carried to the electorate itself. The result 
 was a law that no school shall receive any portion of school 
 moneys in which the religious doctrines or tenets of any Chris- 
 tian or other religious sect shall be taught, inculcated, or prac- 
 tised.^ 
 
 Another specimen of friction and of the way of removing it 
 comes from within the original Northwest Territory. As early 
 as 1842 Cincinnati was agitated by complaints that text-books 
 used in the schools contained passages that were obnoxious to 
 Catholics, and that Catholic children were required to read 
 passages from the Protestant Bible. This agitation kept up 
 for twenty-seven years, when Catholic members of the board of 
 education, aided by certain liberals called "freethinkers," 
 passed a resolution that prohibited the reading of the Bible 
 in the schools. Some citizens applied to the superior court 
 for a permanent injunction to prevent the enforcement of this 
 regulation. The court, by a divided vote, granted the petition, 
 
 » For the history of this most interesting case see the classified Bibliography, 
 Division G, first and third paragraphs. 
 
254 STATE AND CHURCH 
 
 but an appeal was had to the supreme court, which reversed the 
 decision and upheld the right of the board of education to make 
 the regulation in question. 
 
 This right had been attacked on the ground of the Ohio con- 
 stitutional provision of 1851, which has already been quoted: 
 "Religion, morality, and knowledge being essential to good 
 government." This, argued the petitioners, not only requires 
 religious instruction in the public schools, but specifically 
 Christian instruction based upon the Bible. This was inferred 
 from the historic connection of this clause in the Ohio constitu- 
 tion with the Ordinance of 1787. The framers of this Ordi- 
 nance, it was said, could have had in mind none but the Chris- 
 tian religion. Opposing counsel pointed out that the Christian 
 religion as thus understood is the Protestant religion, which is 
 essentially sectarian, and that the use of the Bible contemplated 
 by the petitioners is a distinctly Protestant use. Consequently, 
 it was argued, the petitioners practically maintain that Ohio has 
 a state religion. Therefore counsel for the board of education 
 labored to show that the State of Ohio, like the United States, 
 has no religion, Protestant or Catholic, Christian or other. 
 
 In the superior court, two of the three judges assented, each 
 in his own way, to the proposition that the State of Ohio has 
 a religion. "We are led to the conclusion,'' says one of them, 
 " that revealed religion, as it is made known in the Holy Scrip- 
 tures, is that alone that is recognized by our constitution." 
 The dissenting judge, however, declares that the only way in 
 which neutrality between the sects can be maintained in the 
 schools is by excluding religious instruction altogether. "To 
 hold that Protestants have a right to have their mode of worship 
 and their Bible used in the common schools, against the will of 
 the board of education ... is to hold to the union of church 
 and state, however we may repudiate and reproach the name." 
 , The opinion of the supreme court coincides with that of the 
 minority member of the superior court. It denies that the 
 Christian religion is a part of the law; it denies altogether 
 that the state has a religion. It is true, runs the reasoning, that 
 religion is necessary to good government, as the constitution 
 
STATE AND CHURCH 255 
 
 says, and the state must have the best reh'gion, but the best 
 religion is to be had, as the constitution indicates, by keeping 
 hands off — by protecting all forms of religion, so that, through 
 their own interactions and conflicts, the best may come to light. ^ 
 
 The difficulty of maintaining in law the distinction be- 
 tween religion and sectarian religion. There is a large 
 mass of opinion among religionists and educators to the effect 
 that since church and religion are not the same, the separation 
 of the state from the church does not imply that the state or^ 
 its schools must be non-religious. The warring sects hold much 
 in common; why should it not be taught in the schools? 
 Some court decisions support this conclusion. For example, in 
 the celebrated Edgerton case, the supreme court of Wisconsin 
 held that the use of any version of the Bible as a text-book in 
 the public schools is sectarian instruction, yet one of the judges 
 took pains to say that the decision of the court does not hinder 
 the use of passages of the Bible for the purpose of moral in- 
 struction, or even for inculcating the broad principles of re- 
 ligion that are common to all the sects.^ 
 
 As a matter of pure theory the distinction between religion 
 and sectarianism can doubtless maintain itself. In the ad- 
 ministration of schools, however, there are factors other than 
 those contemplated by the theory. These additional factors are : 
 
 (1) The teacher, who is almost certain to have received his 
 religious training from a sect. No teacher, it may be said, 
 can teach with conviction what is common to the sects with- 
 out more or less leaning toward or away from something in 
 some of the sects. By the position of an emphasis, or by silence 
 with regard to some point, if not by positive assertion, a particu- 
 lar tint is sure to be given to the instruction. As a matter of 
 fact, is there, or can there be in real life any such thing as a 
 colorless religion? Is not the notion an abstraction? Actual 
 
 1 The Bible in the Public Schools. Arguments in the Case of John D. Minor 
 et al Superior Court of Cincinnati. With the Opinions and Decision of the 
 Court Cincinnati. Robert Clarke & Co., 1870; Board of Education. Opinion 
 and Decision of Supreme Court of Ohio in J. D. Minor vs. Board of Education. 
 Cincinnati. 1873; see also 23 Ohio State Reports, Granger, 21-254. 
 
 2 76 Wisconsin Reports, Conover, 177. 
 
256 STATE AND CHURCH 
 
 religion, the sort that one feels and acts out, is always a product 
 of particular historical conditions, and it always involves par- 
 ticular social relations over which conflict is likely, even certain, 
 to occur. How, for example, can any actual religiousness be 
 entirely indifferent to priests? How can one steer a middle 
 course between reverence for them and hostility toward them? 
 If one assumes an attitude of simple non-recognition, is not 
 this itself hostility? 
 
 (2) The parents and the board of education that represents 
 them. We must reckon with the possibility of religious sensi- 
 tiveness on the part of persons who have not studied the phi- 
 losophy of religion, and are not trained to see or feel the religious 
 affinities between sects. The control of the schools rests ul- 
 timately in plain citizens like these. One group of them easily 
 becomes distrustful toward religious teaching by a teacher who 
 belongs to a competing group. Moreover, the most strictly 
 non-partisan teaching that can be achieved is likely to be un- 
 satisfactory by reason of what it omits. 
 
 (3) The ecclesiastical organizations. Most of them main- 
 tain a ministry that is jealous for the doctrines of its particular 
 church, and likewise apprehensive of encroachments from some 
 other church. Moreover, several churches claim to be the 
 church. The direct consequence of the claim to exclusive 
 authority as teacher of religion is this: Insistence that any 
 religious teaching that is given in the public schools be super- 
 vised by the authority-possessing church, the only alternative 
 being the exclusion of all such teaching. Many Protestants, 
 accustomed to think of the content of a doctrine without special 
 regard to the problem of doctrinal authority, fancy that the 
 public schools might teach in peace the doctrines that are held 
 in common by Catholic and Protestant. But this would be 
 Protestant teaching ! It would be so because it would assume 
 the Protestant position of liberty in teaching and in learning. 
 Catholics will not accept any such plan. From their point of 
 view any religious teaching whatever that is done without 
 Catholic authorization contains an implied denial of the Catholic 
 doctrine of authority. 
 
STATE AND CHURCH 257 
 
 It is conceivable that Protestantism, because of its tendency 
 toward religious liberty, that is to say, toward appreciation of 
 common humanity as against all sectarianism, might, if left to 
 itself, unite upon some plan for teaching religion in the public 
 schools. But under existing conditions the law has to regard 
 Protestantism in its totality as a sect over against Catholicism 
 as another sect. If it seems anomalous, even absurd, that a 
 state that is built upon liberty and equality should forbid itself 
 to teach religious liberty, we should remind ourselves that our 
 loyalties are manifold, that they are not matters of logic merely, 
 and that they win many of their greatest victories not by might 
 nor by power, but by spirit. 
 
 Catholic dissatisfaction with the public school system. 
 The doctrine of infallibility, as formulated by the Vatican Coun- 
 cil, declares that the Pope, when he speaks with authority, is 
 infallible in all matters of faith and morals. The Catholic 
 Church as teacher, accordingly, claims exclusive prerogative in 
 everything that is included under the category of character- 
 formation. In strictness, then, the state has no right to teach 
 morals. But can the teaching of morals, or can character- 
 formation be separated from the ordinary instruction of an 
 elementary curriculum? The Catholic answer is that the 
 young pupil, knowing that his schooling is intended to prepare 
 him for life, gets from his school experience an impression of 
 what is important in life. If the school is silent upon the great 
 issues of religion and morals, this silence itself tends to give 
 religion and morals a secondary place in the child's outlook. 
 Therefore the Catholic contention is that religion and morals 
 must be taught in continuous connection with the usual common 
 school branches. 
 
 Two things follow: First, the parish school, and second, dis- 
 satisfaction toward the public schools. This dissatisfaction 
 manifests itself in various ways. In repeated instances the read- 
 ing of the Bible in the schools has been complained of on the 
 ground of its sectarianism. In some cases, after the use of the 
 Bible has been discontinued, the schools have been condemned as 
 "godless." But the most common complaint is that Catholics 
 
258 STATE AND CHURCH 
 
 are obliged to pay taxes for the support of schools to which they 
 cannot conscientiously send their children. Hence the oft- 
 renewed agitation for a division of the school funds whereby 
 parish schools shall be compensated for teaching the common 
 school branches. 
 
 Premising as before that something more than logic is in- 
 volved in the adjustment of our differences (as witness the 
 very great extent to which Catholics find it possible to use 
 the public schools, after all), we may well notice that, in strict 
 logic, there is a profound contrast, which amounts to opposition, 
 between the theory of education that prevails among Catholic 
 thinkers and that which underlies education in the modern 
 secular state. The theory of the modern state is that it has a 
 right to educate the children as a necessity for its own safety 
 and progress, and as a means of promoting the common wel- 
 fare. Hence compulsory education laws. On the Catholic 
 side, when the right to educate is in question, the emphasis is 
 upon the parent rather than the state. Inasmuch, however, as 
 the parent is required to obey the church, the Catholic theory 
 may fairly be said to be this : That the church alone has a right 
 to control the culture of mind and of character. That is, from 
 the standpoint of theory alone, accommodations and adjust- 
 ments in actual practice being ignored, Catholicism has not yet 
 assimilated the educational philosophy of the modern state. 
 
 The demand for division of public school funds with parish 
 schools. The argument for partial support of parish schools 
 by taxation runs to the effect that these schools, while accom- 
 plishing their religious purpose, fulfil also the ends of the state 
 by teaching such subjects as reading, writing, arithmetic, etc., 
 and that the state may properly pay the parochial school for 
 teaching these subjects, especially as Catholic taxpayers are de- 
 barred by conscientious scruples from using the public schools. 
 
 If the problem could be reduced in reality to such simple 
 terms as buying a certain amount of knowledge of this or that, 
 it would be easy enough; the state would simply examine in 
 certain subjects, and pay a stipulated amount for every pupil 
 who reaches a prescribed grade. But the educational purpose 
 
STATE AND CHURCH 259 
 
 of the state is not as meagre as this. The state desires to ex- 
 press itself to its children. A democracy must transcend class 
 consciousness, must support and develop the sense of human 
 equality, must train the different elements of the population to 
 co-operation by early habituation of children, and by early 
 awakening a consciousness of citizenship, of common citizenship, 
 and of what it means. Can a parish school, which is a class 
 school, accomplish this ? The very purpose of a parish school is, 
 primarily and predominantly, to cement together a particular 
 group within the state. It causes children of this group to 
 associate with one another, not with children of other popula- 
 tion-groups. And within this closed society the state never 
 speaks in its own person, least of all with its own authority. 
 
 It is an obviously sound axiom of administration that wher- 
 ever public funds go, public control should go also. But a 
 practicable method of public control within a parish school has 
 never been devised. Nor is one likely to be discovered. For 
 the teacher in such a school is appointed by and is answerable 
 to the ecclesiastical power — is an agent of this power and not 
 at all of the state. The act of teaching is here an act of the 
 church, not the joint act of state and church, nor a mixtm*e or 
 alternation of acts first by the church and then by the state. 
 There is, in short, no sphere within a parish school in which 
 the state could act of its own authority; it would be able to 
 act at all only by invitation, permission, or compact. 
 
 Public appropriations for parish schools would therefore 
 mark a sort of one-sided union of church and state, one-sided 
 because, though it would assure the church of its sectarian aims, 
 it would not assure the state that its children will receive a 
 broadly social training. That any large number of citizens 
 should be conscientiously unable to use the public schools 
 is deeply to be regretted. That these citizens have shown 
 their faith by paying, here and there, for a second set of day 
 schools is a matter for admiration. But this is the cost to them 
 of religious conditions that divide citizens instead of uniting 
 them. The public should not pay the cost of that which 
 separates citizens from one another. Not only so; it should 
 
260 STATE AND CHURCH 
 
 be a settled part of public policy to keep the public schools so 
 richly attractive, so broad, humane, and responsive to com- 
 munity need, that they will continue to be, but in growing mea- 
 sure, schools of the whole people, the great mixer and democ- 
 ratizer of our heterogeneous population. 
 
 How some Protestants would have religion taught in the 
 public schools. The dissatisfaction of the Catholics touches 
 the public school system as such, the basal principles of it. 
 Protestants, as a rule, accept these principles, but there is con- 
 siderable Protestant unrest over the way in which non-sectarian- 
 ism works in actual practice. Many claim that the schools can 
 teach religion and yet remain unsectarian, and the point is 
 made again and again that, though the necessity for religious 
 education is as broad as the nation, the present provisions for 
 it are relatively narrow. In the first place, a considerable pro- 
 portion of the children receives no religious instruction at home 
 or through Sunday schools. In the next place, the amount of 
 instruction given by the Sunday school to its pupils is piti- 
 fully small. In the third place, the quality of the teaching in 
 Sunday schools is unsatisfactory. Are we not, then, actually 
 in danger of becoming a non-religious people? 
 
 Moved by such considerations, many Protestants are strenu- 
 ous to retain or to introduce Bible reading in the public schools. 
 A smaller number calls for specific religious instruction in these 
 schools. The nature of these proposals requires careful 
 scrutiny. 
 
 (1) The ground for demanding Bible reading in the schools is 
 ambiguous. The argument shifts back and forth between the 
 value of the Bible as literature, and its value for religious 
 guidance. It might seem ungracious to suggest that effort is 
 being made to introduce religious teaching under the head of 
 merely literary study. Yet one can hardly help seeing in the 
 background of this whole agitation the distinctly Protestant 
 emphasis upon the Bible as the authoritative word of God. It is 
 unlikely that the agitators for Bible reading would be satisfied 
 to have the Bible treated in the schools exactly like other 
 literature. No; a distinctive, unique reverence is expected, and 
 
STATE AND CHURCH 261 
 
 even worship In direct connection with the Scripture reading. 
 In short, it is proposed to make the state schools an agency for 
 propagating a distinctly Protestant attitude toward the au- 
 thority of the Scriptures. 
 
 (2) Protestant agitation for religion in the scJiools has not 
 sufficiently considered that in the eyes of the law Catholic and 
 non-Catholic versions of the Bible alike, and Protestant as well as 
 Catholic worship, are coming to be regarded as sectarian. The 
 crux of the matter is the CathoHc claim to exclusive religious 
 authority. This claim is, of course, sectarianism. But, justly, 
 or unjustly. Catholic citizens take the ground that to deny this 
 authority, or even to practise religion without recognizing it, ia 
 also sectarianism. Here, in fact, the population is cut in two, 
 and the courts, quite naturally, attempt to keep the schools 
 neutral as between them. Therefore any version of the Bible 
 whatever will have only a precarious standing In the schools if a 
 parent chooses to object to it as sectarian. The same is true 
 of worship. It must be either Catholic or non-Catholic, and 
 therefore open to objection from one side or the other. Objec- 
 tion is not always made, to be sure. In communities that are 
 fairly homogeneous in religious population, the schools often 
 practise religion and teach It without producing friction. But 
 growth of a community in size and in heterogeneity of race and 
 of religion commonly puts an end to the old acquiescence in a 
 particular type of religion in the schools, whereupon we face 
 the alternative of introducing more types upon a plane of mu- 
 tual equality, or else of excluding all. 
 
 (3) Undue hopes are entertained as to the religious effect of 
 listening to the reading of Bible passages. Again we hear a faint 
 echo of the old Protestant conviction that in the very words of 
 the Scriptures God speaks directly to each individual. Without 
 doubt mere listening to elevated sentiments well phrased has 
 some effect upon the listener, especially if the words reinforce 
 something that the pupil learns in other ways also. That is, 
 Bible readings might be significantly fitted into a genuine plan 
 for religious education, and such readings in the day school might 
 happen to add something to the effectiveness of religious teach- 
 
262 STATE AND CHURCH 
 
 ing in home or in Sunday school. But of themselves, as mere 
 fragments, by chance related or not to other parts of a system, 
 they cannot be regarded as having the educational significance 
 that the vehemence of the agitation often seems to assume. 
 
 (4) Plans are lacking for the preparation of public school 
 teachtrs for the teaching of religion. No one can think that re- 
 ligion can be taught by mere words regardless of the religious 
 character and convictions of the teacher. No one who thinks 
 in educational terms can suppose that the effective teaching 
 of religion requires no specific preparation therefor. How, 
 then, shall we assure ourselves of the personal and professional 
 fitness of public school teachers in this matter ? What shall be 
 the tests ? What shall the normal schools add to their curricu- 
 lum? Merely to state these questions is to expose the educa- 
 tional shortsightedness of the agitation for teaching religion in 
 the schools. Imagine the state undertaking to prepare, test, 
 and supervise teachers of religion I In the interest of religion 
 itself we should deny that the state is competent to teach it. 
 
 What a democratic state can contribute to a socialized 
 religious education. The considerations to which we have 
 just attended may seem at first sight to isolate the state from 
 religion, and to strip and impoverish the human spirit, instead 
 of enriching it, in the schools. It would be so if religion were 
 identical with either dogmatism or ecclesiasticism. For both 
 are in their inmost nature sectarian; they have always divided 
 Christians from one another. If we should identify religion 
 with them the schools would have to be secular not only in the 
 sense already defined (that is, that they leave the organization 
 of religion altogether to private initiative), but also in the sense 
 that state education and religious education would pursue 
 divergent rather than convergent aims. The schools, giving 
 ultimate value to the broadly human, would have a tendency 
 to promote a secularistic life in distinction from the religious 
 life as thus conceived. But nothing of the kind will be implied 
 if we advance from dogmatic and ecclesiastical standpoints in 
 religious education to a fully social position. When we bring 
 religious education under the conception of the democracy of 
 
STATE AND CHURCH 263. 
 
 God, we have a socially unifying aim to which everything that 
 is truly democratizing and humanizing in state education con- 
 tributes. For example, a public school that causes pupils of 
 several racial groups to mingle with one another as neighbors, 
 and to realize their unity in a common devotion to the flag as 
 a symbol of liberty, promotes thereby the precise aims that 
 socialized religion would have in a similar situation. In a 
 certain school upon the Pacific coast the pupils of Caucasian 
 extraction, though their daily life is surrounded by prejudice 
 against Mongolians, have become convinced disciples of equal 
 opportunity for Chinese pupils, and have even become protec- 
 tors of Chinese children against aggression from "Americans." 
 If an exactly parallel phenomenon were to occur in a Sunday 
 school we should spontaneously think of it as a triumph of 
 Christian education. 
 
 The interest of a socialized religious education in the public 
 schools is not that they should teach religion in addition to read- 
 ing, writing, and arithmetic, but that they should teach de- j 
 mocracy, and that they should do it thoroughly. To "teach'*"" 
 democracy, it need hardly be argued at this stage of our dis- 
 cussion, means to develop intelligent democratic attitudes, 
 activities, habits, and purposes — in short, to make the pupils 
 democrats. 
 
 Here lies the acutest part of the problem of moral instruction 
 and training in the public schools. Real educators are chary 
 of proposals to "introduce moral education" into the schools. 
 It is there already in every piece of work that the pupils are led 
 to do thoroughly; it is there in everything that produces loyalty 
 to the reasonable rules of the school ; it is there in the co-opera- 
 tive life of schoolroom and playground; it is there in customs 
 and measures that make for community consciousness and for 
 political idealism — it cannot be introduced, it can only be im- 
 proved. The improvement for which we most need to strive, 
 about which anxiety is most'nearly justified, concerns, not a set 
 of standard virtues that are the same under tyranny and under 
 liberty, but measures for leading pupils to have as their own the 
 great purposes of democracy, which are not only humane, but 
 
264 STATE AND CHURCH 
 
 also constructive and aggressive. The problem of morals in the 
 schools melts into the problem of creating ambition for a sort 
 of society that is partly prefigured in our historic national 
 ideals, but is still for the most part unachieved. Give us public 
 schools that develop active interest in human welfare, passion 
 for the basal rights of man as man, faith in the capacity of men 
 for unselfishness, and the habit and purpose of co-operation — 
 give us public schools like these, and social religion will look 
 upon them as doing God's will even though they do not name 
 his name, but only that of his children. 
 
 The appropriate policy for socialized religion with respect to 
 the state schools, then, is neither to curb their influence be- 
 cause they are secular, nor to induce them to take over worship 
 or instruction in religion as such, but to get them to realize more 
 and more the possibilities of government of the whole people, 
 by the whole people, and for the whole people, and to provide 
 ever better and better training of intelligence and of will with 
 reference thereto. Ultimately all the schools may be expected 
 to provide, as some do now, training in both remedial and pre- 
 ventive philanthropy. In addition they will become nurseries 
 of political progress, not indeed by being tools of political par- 
 ties, but by constantly recalling attention to the human values 
 that furnish the only ground for the real settlement of political 
 questions. 
 
 The specific educational functions of free religion in 
 a free state. To organized religion there will remain the edu- 
 cational privilege of inclusiveness and of prophecy. How long 
 states will assume that national selfishness and self-will are 
 politically legitimate, no one can say, but as long as they do, as 
 long as the sociality of the state is arbitrarily limited to a race 
 or to a territory, religious education will have the function of 
 humanizing the state. In the name of the God of the whole 
 earth, who is the Father of all men, the church must reveal the 
 large sociality that takes in the self-governing state but tran- 
 scends it. 
 
 Just so, the great social problems of individual destiny, the 
 destiny of friendship and love, and the destiny of the race it- 
 
STATE AND CHURCH 265 
 
 self — problems of the meaning of life that call for the unflinch- 
 ing eye and the resolute heart — will remain to the churches as 
 voluntary associations. There are depths of human need that 
 the state does not undertake to sound. There are valleys of 
 experience for which it provides no companion or guide. There 
 are heights of self-sacrifice to which it does not venture to point. 
 
 Through every social problem, moreover, whether it falls 
 under the purview of the state school or not, there runs the com- 
 mon human need for inspiration, for the divine inbreathing of 
 hope, for uncompromising love, for far-sight, for letting go the 
 half-gods in a great and ultimate faith in Fatherhood and 
 Brotherhood. 
 
 To the churches that have caught a glimpse of this educa- 
 tional horizon falls the task of experimenting and agitating 
 with a view to a permanent system of democratic religious in- 
 struction and training for the children of the whole nation. Re- 
 ligious education for the whole people must be provided by the 
 churches at their own expense. Buildings, equipment, trained 
 teachers, scientific supervision — all these must be had. No 
 mere spurt or spasm will accomplish all this; we must enter 
 upon a long campaign, only the beginnings of which we our- 
 selves can live to see. The campaign will be expensive in point 
 of financial cost, of loyal labor for a distant goal, of hard study 
 and patient experiment, of disappointments, of deferred hopes, 
 of strains between friends. But no one who knows the genius 
 of the Christian religion will imagine that the love that loves 
 to the uttermost can be otherwise than costly either to God or 
 to those who would be godlike. 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 THE DENOMINATIONAL DEPARTMENT OF 
 RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 
 
 The emergence of religious education within denomina- 
 tional consciousness. The fact that Sunday schools are uni- 
 versal in a denomination, or that improvements in them are 
 actively labored for, does not of itself prove the presence of the 
 idea of religious education in the denominational consciousness, 
 much less of thought-out standards and policies for education 
 as distinguished from other operations. As long as Sunday 
 school teaching is controlled by the tacit assumption that it is 
 a branch of expository preaching or of evangelistic appeal, there 
 is little about it that is distinctive of education. Under these 
 conditions such a simple, rudimentary educational process as 
 habit-formation — to take a single example — is scarcely under- 
 taken at all. Habits may be talked about, exhortations about 
 them may be plentiful, but the actual habit-forming process is 
 not under conscious control. This example may stand for 
 many facts. The Sunday school, under these conditions, is a 
 school chiefly in a germinal sense, practically all that is specifi- 
 cally and technically educational not yet having come to clear 
 consciousness. 
 
 The lack of denominational educational consciousness in the 
 immediate past is revealed and typified by the fact that in 
 several large denominations the functions of a department of 
 religious education are only now being differentiated from those 
 of a denominational publishing house or society. That a de- 
 nomination should have educational principles and policy; 
 that the duty of carrying them into the whole denominational 
 life should be committed to a corps of educational specialists; 
 and that the Sunday-school publications should become organs 
 
 266 
 
THE DENOMINATIONAL DEPARTMENT 267 
 
 for such principles and policy under the guidance of these 
 specialists — this is new to the old-line publisher, and it is new to 
 the Sunday schools that are his patrons. 
 
 As each of our cities has a department of education that 
 is not confused, say, with the police department, or with the 
 street department, and as every enlightened board of education 
 seeks the services of an expert educator as superintendent of 
 schools, so the unmistakable trend in the religious denominations 
 is toward a distinct educational consciousness expressed in a 
 department that employs expert and technical service. The 
 idea of the "technical," with its basis in the "scientific," has 
 come only slowly, it is true, into control even of the public 
 schools; in many parts of the country it has not yet arrived at 
 clear consciousness, but is subordinated to office-holding de- 
 signs, or to ignorant economy. We must not be surprised when 
 we meet like inertia in the churches. Official positions and 
 financial costs will create problems and difficulties. But al- 
 ready the movement of specializing toward the expert and the 
 technical has begun on a denominational scale in several of the 
 bodies. We may confidently expect that advances in religious 
 education will be made in the future not merely school by 
 school, but also denomination by denomination, thousands of 
 schools going forward simultaneously. 
 
 Unifying the educational work of a denomination. A sure 
 sign of the infancy of educational consciousness on the denom- 
 inational scale is our habit of identifying departments of re- 
 ligious education with departments of Sunday schools. What, 
 then, of young people's societies and other organizations of the 
 young, and what of denominational academies and colleges? 
 The purpose of all these, as far as it is defined at all, is educa- 
 tional in a broad, if not a technical, sense. The specific ground 
 of their existence is expectation of religious results. But clarity 
 of purpose, policies appropriate to the purpose, and efficiency in 
 executing it, have been generally lacking. We have already 
 noticed the waste in local societies through overlapping, dupli- 
 cating, and scattering. This evil could be cured through whole 
 denominations if they had a unified educational department. 
 
268 THE DENOMINATIONAL DEPARTMENT 
 
 That the general board of a young people's society should be an 
 independent department of a denomination, or even an outside 
 body without responsibility to the educational authorities of 
 the denomination, is as anomalous as would be, in the public 
 schools, a department of physical culture that is not responsible 
 to the superintendent of schools or to the board of education. 
 
 As to denominational academies and colleges, it is not unfair 
 to say that, though they are interested in both education and 
 religion, they have rarely conceived of education in religion as 
 their central function and the reason for their existence. There 
 has been lack of a definite conception of religious education as 
 a specialized undertaking based upon laws of growth and there- 
 fore requiring both continuity and technical care. Adminis- 
 trators who sincerely desire to promote Christian character 
 have believed in technical proficiency and continuity anywhere 
 but here, and they have rarely been ready to pay the cost of 
 it. Instead, they have added inexpensive non-educational 
 rehgion to expensive non-religious education. The most usual 
 methods of doing this are the maintenance of unsystematized, 
 discontinuous preaching; supporting either shoddy Bible study 
 because of its religiousness, or a sound department of Bible 
 under the supposition that instruction in the Scriptures is re- 
 ligious instruction or even rehgious education; transferring the 
 religious functions of the institution to student Christian 
 associations, with their immature leadership; and resorting 
 to occasionalistic, high-pressure revival meetings. 
 
 One element in the situation is, of course, the increasing 
 difficulty of meeting the educational standards of state institu- 
 tions. Into new courses, new buildings, and new laboratory 
 equipment, money and thought have been forced to go. Relig- 
 ion has had no like force that it could bring to bear upon 
 administrators. Hence it has tended to become, as far as 
 administration is concerned, an appendage of education, or an 
 accompaniment of it, and not a too expensive one. 
 
 A final reason why the educational resources of each de- 
 nomination have not been unified into a scheme of religious 
 education is the inherent difficulty of constructing such a 
 
THE DENOMINATIONAL DEPARTMENT 2G9 
 
 scheme upon the basis of a pre-soclal interpretation of the 
 Christian religion. How can a college that awakens its students 
 to the liberty of science advise the same students at the same 
 time to take the intellectual attitudes of dogmatic religion? 
 How can a college that opens the eyes of its students to law and 
 growth and continuity in nature, in history, and in the mind of 
 man, represent the religious experience as a separate, indepen- 
 dent, and discontinuous thing? If an attempt is made to cul- 
 tivate both, it is practically certain that two different sets of 
 men will do the cultivating, that the religious work will be set 
 off by itself and isolated, and that the religious appeal will 
 tend toward occasionalism and toward emotions split off from 
 academic interests. 
 
 But when the Christian religion is conceived as the purpose 
 to co-operate with God in building democracy, it offers a uni- 
 fying and organizing, not dividing, principle for education. 
 All the legitimate work of a college can be brought under this 
 purpose. All of it will be vivified when it receives this baptism. 
 The dawdling of students in our colleges; the childishness that 
 clings to them after they have become grown men and women; 
 the dilettanteism of alumni associations; the lack of positive 
 content in college loyalty; the administrative drifting, and the 
 atrophy of social will in the professor's marooned specialty — 
 this is our academic tragedy. This is the educational worldli- 
 ness from which we must be converted. 
 
 Here is the unique opportunity of the college that is willing 
 as an institution to confess Christ. Let it conceive its whole 
 mission in terms of the democracy of God. Let it test its cur- 
 riculum, its administration, its budget, its alumni by their con- 
 tributions to social welfare, social justice, and world society. 
 Let it dare to be different from other colleges by having a focal- 
 ized social purpose, whereas their purposes are dispersed and 
 foggy. Let it consciously serve a cause, a radical cause that 
 appeals to the idealism of youth. And in all this let it not 
 assign God to any compartment of the mind, but assuming that 
 "where love is God is," let it teach its students to find com- 
 munion with him precisely in social relations with men, in the 
 
270 THE DENOMINATIONAL DEPARTMENT 
 
 social task, In all the study that prepares for it, and in the in- 
 spiration that impels to it. 
 
 One can imagine the entire educational machinery of a de- 
 nomination coming under the control of this unifying purpose. 
 One would then behold a sight as inspiring as it would be new — 
 the Sunday school, the societies, the academies, and the colleges 
 all marching together toward a single goal. What an immea- 
 surable, unprecedented contribution to society would accrue 
 if even one Christian body should thus organize its educational 
 powers. But to do it an educational department would be 
 necessary, a department that could command the services of 
 experimenters, writers, editors, promoters, and administrators; 
 that could have access to all the educational agencies of the 
 denomination, and that could be to each of them a medium 
 of denominational stimulus and of denominational support. 
 
 Producing teachers and leaders. In a denominational policy 
 like this nothing is more vital than to provide real educators, 
 and nothing is more difficult. For the push is toward specializa- 
 tion, the technical, the ascertainably efficient, not toward mere 
 proclamation, exhortation, or agitation, which are far easier. 
 The task that is before us is nothing less than to provide a con- 
 tinuous supply of skilled workers through the whole depart- 
 ment, from the humblest lay teacher in a Sunday school to the 
 corps of professional experts who guide the entire denomina- 
 tion. 
 
 (1) Training the unpaid lay workers in the parish. "Teacher 
 training *' is too narrow a term for what is here intended. For 
 officers of a Sunday school, as well as teachers, require help. 
 Nor is the Sunday school all. The church school must include, 
 as we have seen, all the work for children and youth, and there- 
 fore the work of parents and of various leaders of groups. 
 Hence, the training division or department of the school will 
 touch perhaps the major part of the adult active members of the 
 parish. To suggest that this mass of laymen should be trained 
 by the church for genuine skill as educators will perhaps cause 
 some persons to smile at the visionariness of the proposal, and 
 others to frown in dismay at the crushing responsibilities that 
 would fall upon church administrators. I have no desire to 
 
THE DENOMINATIONAL DEPARTMENT 271 
 
 concecal the degree to which church Hfe will have to be triins- 
 formed if this vision is to be realized. Sunday and week-day 
 meetings to which church members are now invited for their 
 own spiritual refreshment will to a large extent be converted 
 into periods for instruction and drill in the specific duties of 
 church workers. Instead of "attending the church service,'* 
 one will give the church service, and study how to give the best. 
 Worship , as a result, will have more point, and more firm 
 attachment to daily living. The desultoriness of miscellaneous 
 sermonizing, too, will give place to continuity, system, and the 
 urgency of immediate needs. 
 
 To convert a listening church into a working church is not the 
 matter of a day or of a season but of a generation. Many an 
 experiment must be made, not every one of which will succeed. 
 Advance will not be steady or even all along the line. We 
 must use half-measures as a means to better ones. We must 
 honor any layman's best, however imperfect it may be. But, 
 granted this spirit of tolerant, patient practicality, a policy of 
 constant pressure toward skilled churchmanship will in one 
 generation produce a new type of churchman. 
 
 The content and the methods of training courses for different 
 sorts of lay workers in religious education cannot here be dis- 
 cussed in any detail. The most that is permitted is a hint or 
 two as to some fundamental conditions of efficiency. 
 
 First, The possibility of developing a body of skilled non- 
 professional religious educators grows out of the fact that 
 both the motive for study and the material that most needs to 
 be studied lie within the sphere of the domestic instincts, par- 
 ticularly the parental. Between instinctive fondness for 
 children and Christian love for mankind there is entire con- 
 tinuity. Training in the motive to teach, then — and this is the 
 corner-stone of the whole enterprise — will consist in bringing 
 the parental instinct into action, whether one is a parent or 
 not, and in developing instinctive attachments into an intelli- 
 gent Christian purpose to transform society into a family of God. 
 Stated in another way, the basis of the best training is the in- 
 telligent focussmg of one's Christian experience upon the social 
 will of God as it applies to children and youth. 
 
272 THE DENOMINATIONAL DEPARTMENT 
 
 Second, This experience of God in an intelligently develop- 
 ing fondness for children is to be had primarily through one's 
 own interactions with particular children, not through child- 
 study generalizations made by other persons. The material for 
 study is first of all living beings, and only secondarily books. 
 
 Many a training class, reversing this order, has gotten as 
 far as the book, and then stopped. Labor was put upon defini- 
 tions and laws under the supposition that somehow the knowl- 
 edge of them would constitute knowledge of children, but in the 
 end these formulse did not even introduce the student to real 
 children, but remained mere lumber in the attic of the mind. 
 No; observation of children is fundamental. It needs to be 
 guided, of course, for the most effective observation, as has 
 been said, is that which puts definite questions to nature. But 
 in this case the questions that most need to be asked are not 
 the critically analytical ones of the theoretical psychologist 
 (such as the precise number and the classification of the instincts, 
 the precise nature of imitation, or the part played by motile 
 images in the growth of intelligence), but broader questions as 
 to children's conduct, particularly how they act in given social 
 situations. For the objective point throughout is to be able to 
 make such changes in social situations as will produce desired 
 changes in children's social attitudes, purposes, and habits. 
 Not that we need to be shy of academic generalizations, but 
 that we should follow the rule of good teaching that formulse 
 are to be brought in when the pupil already has something that 
 needs formulating. The end of our teaching in the training 
 class, moreover, is not the achievement of a sound generaliza- 
 tion, as it is in much academic teaching, but ability to regulate 
 the social relations of children so as to get certain social results. 
 Of course the professional educators who are back of this train- 
 ing of laymen will control their own thinking in some measure 
 by finer distinctions and more details of a technical kind, but 
 what the rank and file of the lay educators require is the more 
 homespun sort of wisdom. 
 
 Third, In accordance with the well-worn maxim that we learn 
 by doing, practice in educational processes or part-processes 
 
THE DENOMINATIONAL DEPARTMENT 273 
 
 is fundamental in the training of lay educators. We must rid 
 our constituency of the naive superstition that teacher training 
 consists in laying in a stock of ideas about teaching. Ideas 
 are, of course, essential to skill, which is ability to get a specific 
 result by means of knowledge. But skill is achieved by the 
 fusion of doing and thinking into one. Training for the church- 
 school worker, then, will not be isolated from the actual work 
 of the school. The school itself will be his immediate object 
 of study, and his relation to it as a student will be that of an 
 apprentice. Observation and practice, then, which we may call 
 the laboratory method, will assume the primacy that the text- 
 book now holds. 
 
 Fourth, The fallacy of outline courses must be exposed and 
 abandoned; that is, the attempt to cover a wide area in a short 
 time by making the instruction very thin. This is not the way 
 to gain even abstract knowledge, much less to gain skill. 
 "One thing at a time, and this done well." The acquisition of 
 firm control in a single process is not only important in itself; 
 it has also an outreaching influence. It is almost fascinating 
 to witness the general transformation in the attitude of a teacher 
 who, having conquered his faults in a particular process, now 
 knows that he can deliberately get the results that he aims at. 
 Such an experience carries a teacher a hundred times further 
 toward general skill than committing to memory abstract formu- 
 lae for the whole of good teaching. 
 
 Therefore, if the time available for training during any one 
 season happens to be short, we must not on this account dilute 
 the contents of the course. Whether the time be long or short, 
 let the work be intensive, and let the standard be demonstrated 
 improvement in some actual educational process, whether story- 
 telling, preparing lesson plans or schemes of questioning, keep- 
 ing records, making reports, conducting worship, teaching one's 
 own child his first prayer, or merely discovering the cause of 
 inattention on a particular occasion. 
 
 (2) The opportunity of the college to produce lay leaders of parish 
 education. Granted the social view of collegiate education, as 
 outlined in a preceding section, there are three points at which 
 
274 THE DENOMINATIONAL DEPARTMENT 
 
 the college may be expected to touch the problem of religious 
 education in a positive way. First, the college will promote 
 by educational methods the immediate religious growth of its 
 students. Second, it will include in its curriculum a study of 
 the church as a social institution. This study will concern 
 both the aims and the methods of a socialized church, and its 
 general result will be to send the students back to their home 
 churches qualified to support progressive measures, and to in- 
 itiate and lead them. Third, this elementary study of the church 
 will awaken some of the students to the possibilities and the 
 attractions of the ministry as a life-work, professional specializa- 
 tion in religious education being included. Though a college 
 offers no specifically professional training, it may nevertheless 
 perform the extremely important service of a selective agency 
 for the ministry. Such colleges, however, as offer professional 
 training in preparation for high school teaching may not un- 
 reasonably be asked to lay the foundations for the profession of 
 religious education also. 
 
 Postponing for a moment the problems of professional train- 
 ing for religious education, however, let us glance at the possi- 
 bilities suggested under the second of the just-mentioned heads. 
 There is a common complaint that college experience, even 
 high school experience, not only does not increase the loyalty of 
 young people to the church but actually cools their ardor. The 
 usual interpretation of this cooling process is that the intellec- 
 tual life has been cultivated at the expense of the religious 
 life. The remedy that is usually offered, accordingly, is the 
 cultivation of a personal religious life alongside the intellectual 
 life. 
 
 Underlying this prescription and the diagnosis that precedes 
 it are several assumptions that require scrutiny. On what 
 ground can we assert that the churches, as they now are, fur- 
 nish the one natural sphere for the religious life of educated men 
 and women? Is it certain, then, that growing indifference to 
 his church on the part of a collegian connotes decline in his 
 personal religion ? Is it not just possible that some part of the 
 difficulty grows out of the fact that while his religious outlook 
 
THE DENOMINATIONxVL DEPARTMENT 275 
 
 widens and his religious capacities Increase, the church seems to 
 him to be static ? What does the church do to show him that 
 it is not so? What assurance have we that students really 
 understand what the church is and does? Should we expect 
 them to come back to their home churches to repeat over and 
 over the things that they did when they were just emerging 
 from childhood? If not, what church work is there that calls 
 for the collegian's trained powers, and how can he learn what 
 this work is and what it requires ? 
 
 The answer to these doubts is this : First, a large part of the 
 trouble grows out of the student's sheer Ignorance of the 
 churches, neither the churches nor the college having provided 
 him with the information that his growing mind requires. 
 Rather, when he famishes for information he is given exhorta- 
 tion. Second, least of all has the college or the church revealed 
 to him the place and the possibilities of the church as a social 
 institution that has a contribution to make to the general social 
 movement. Third, personal religious life has been cultivated 
 too much upon the plane of Individual status, and not enough 
 upon the plane of a social purpose held In common. A purpose 
 to build a democracy of God, rather than dogma or emotional 
 experiences, should be the basis of religious fellowship In the 
 college. Fourth, the particular church work In which by far 
 the largest number of laymen is systematically engaged, namely, 
 religious education, calls most naturally for educated leader- 
 ship, yet the college student. Instead of having his eyes opened 
 to the nature of religious education and to the possibility of 
 skilful service In It, Is allowed to think of It in terms of the poor 
 teaching that he himself received in the Sunday school when 
 he was a child. 
 
 The obvious way to deepen the religious life and the church 
 loyalty of college students, then, is to give them opportunity 
 to study religion as social purpose, the church as an instrument 
 of possible social advance, and religious education as an oppor- 
 tunity for educated laymen to help transform the church it- 
 self I At the present moment our real problem Is less that of 
 adjusting the student to the church than that of opening in the 
 
276 THE DENOMINATIONAL DEPARTMENT 
 
 church a highway for the social aspirations that are already 
 present in the minds of the thoughtful. 
 
 There are the best of academic reasons why a course on church 
 life or on religious education should include not only general 
 principles, but also sufficient details of process to enable the 
 student to judge a specimen of teaching and to begin teaching. 
 If the college of yesterday cherished the notion that close con- 
 tact with particular facts is non-essential if only generalizations 
 are well defined, the college of to-day assumes that, even in the 
 interest of a vital grasp of general principles themselves, speci- 
 men facts, at least, need to be observed and analyzed by the 
 student himself, not merely described by the professor or by 
 the text-book. Therefore a consciously close relation of a col- 
 lege study to a life purpose or a foreseen duty reinforces the 
 study itself. Hence, collegiate study of religious education 
 should make the student acquainted with the actual materials 
 used in the church school, with the actual processes employed, 
 with the actual problems of administration. He should see 
 them all with eyes that are wide open to the great social princi- 
 ples that are involved, and to the general underlying laws of 
 teaching. That is, the best college teaching of religious educa- 
 tion, even if no specific professional training is undertaken, will 
 nevertheless prepare the student to be a leader in the actual 
 educational work of the church. 
 
 That insight into the principles and the methods of a social- 
 ized religious education will bring inspiration to do the work 
 itself, let no one doubt. Our idealistic young people bless us 
 when we show them a way in which to make idealism effective. 
 The hard part of the problem is not with them, but with college 
 administration on the one hand, and with church administration 
 on the other. Without uncharitableness, and without blame 
 for limitations for which historical excuses can be made, we 
 may say that the inertia of institutionaHsm in the administra- 
 tion of both college and church is the chief obstacle that stands 
 in the way of a supply of lay leaders in religious education. 
 There are notable instances of colleges that have already be- 
 gun to follow the gleam, but many are faltering, compromising. 
 
THE DENOMINATIONAL DEPARTMENT 277 
 
 or delaying. Too many of our college authorities have not half 
 freed themselves from the pre-social view of the functions of a 
 college. Most administrative officers are half paralyzed by the 
 sleeping sickness of educational conventionality. Even relig- 
 ious colleges have not taken pains to relieve the individualistic 
 squint with which students interpret to themselves the meaning 
 of the Christian religion. Otherwise more, many more, of the 
 colleges would be eager, would vie with one another, to intro- 
 duce students to such an intensive study of religion and of the 
 church as would produce intelligent and aggressive laymen. 
 
 On the other hand, what is more certain to rob the church of 
 skilled lay service than the discovery on the part of collegians 
 that their minister is cold toward their progressive ideas, their 
 fresh enthusiasms, their discontent w^ith things as they are, 
 and warm only toward repetition of things as they have been? 
 There are ministers, and the number is growing, who really 
 lead their people forward and not merely 'round and 'round a 
 circle. But there are others who neither lead forward nor sup- 
 port laymen who are willing to take burdens of leadership upon 
 themselves. Concerning these ministers the greatness of the 
 cause calls for plain speaking. I speak not of hypothetical possi- 
 bilities but of repeated occurrences when I say that it is folly, 
 if it is not treason to the church, for a minister so to receive a 
 young collegian w^ho is eager to take part in aggressive religion 
 as to make him feel isolated, not understood, suspected of being 
 " unspiritual," religiously suppressed. It should be regarded 
 as a clerical scandal for a minister to discourage such reforms in 
 the Sunday school as are universally approved by competent 
 authorities. If we can excuse in the aged some inability to 
 desire change, we can also retire the aged from leadership. 
 But what shall we say of the minister who, before the age for 
 retirement comes, will neither take the trouble to become a 
 competent leader in parish education, nor seek out competent 
 leaders, nor welcome the services of those who, having caught 
 a vision of better things, desire opportunity to serve ? 
 
 (3) Producing professional workers in religious education. 
 It is obvious that the unpaid parish workers whom we have 
 
278 THE DENOMINATIONAL DEPARTMENT 
 
 thus far considered must have guidance from professional 
 leaders, that is, those who receive pay for their service on the 
 ground of its expert quality and on the ground of the time, 
 labor, and expense required to become and to remain an expert. 
 The term "expert" must be interpreted liberally. In the in- 
 fancy of the reform of religious education it cannot mean the 
 finished craftsman, but only the one who, using such oppor- 
 tunities for study and for experience as actually exist, is more 
 ready than others to make wise experiments in reconstruction. 
 In this class we must place, or be able to place, the pastor, the 
 parish director of religious education, the employed lay parish 
 worker, the writers and editors of lessons and of material for 
 teachers, the secretarial force of the denomination's central 
 department of religious education, and teachers of religious 
 education in colleges, theological seminaries, and training- 
 schools for professional lay workers. 
 
 First, A denomination that does not trifle with its own 
 spiritual life will pursue the policy of producing as quickly as 
 possible a generation of pastors who are competent when they 
 enter upon their ministry to lead their parishes in religious edu- 
 cation. More than one denomination already requires every 
 candidate for the ministry to pass an examination in this 
 subject. This shows which way the wind is blowing. But it is 
 of itself little more than a straw, for a meagre smattering of 
 information suffices to meet the present requirement. The 
 theological seminaries are somewhat generally increasing the 
 amount of their instruction in this subject. But if we ask 
 whether they are now ready to supply the churches of the coun- 
 try with pastors who are competent to guide their parishes in 
 the reconstruction of religious education — competent, not in the 
 sense of accomplished and mature craftsmanship, but in the 
 sense of knowing how to begin and how to keep on learning — 
 we must confess that no denomination has yet brought its semi- 
 naries to this standard. 
 
 The seminaries, like the colleges, are hampered by pre- 
 social views of their educational function. They are divided in 
 their curriculum and in their methods between a desire to make 
 
THE DENOMINATIONAL DEPARTMENT 279 
 
 their students accomplished and a desire to make them efficient. 
 Much, very much, has still to be done, too, upon the theory both 
 of Christian experience and of the church as a social agency. 
 But certain parts of the issue are clear. It is fair to put these 
 two questions to any seminary: Are you ready, and are you 
 equipped in faculty and in library, to utilize the church's ex- 
 perience in religious education, and the resources of educational 
 science as these bear upon education specifically in religion? 
 If so, have you so organized the requirements that you make 
 of your students, and the motives that you bring to bear upon 
 them, that your graduates go out, as a matter of fact, equipped 
 as beginners in the professional guidance of religious education 
 in a parish ? 
 
 Second, A denomination that is educationally awake will 
 apply the same principle to the curriculum and the methods of 
 training-schools for professional lay workers, such as deacon- 
 esses, pastor's assistants, parish visitors, Sunday-school super- 
 intendents, and missionaries. These schools, in fact, having 
 fewer educational traditions to hamper them, have outstripped 
 the seminaries in this respect. Great possibilities of specialized 
 professional lay service are appearing upon the horizon. If 
 a really scientific training in the educational branch of Chris- 
 tian work gets a footing in the training-schools three things are 
 likely to happen: Much unspecialized and relatively ineffective 
 parish work will give way to specialized and effective reconstruc- 
 tion of parish education; professional standards in this depart- 
 ment will react upon other departments, so that they too will 
 require and receive specialized skill; and opportunities thus 
 opened will attract into the ranks of the professional lay workers 
 a larger number of able, ambitious, and well educated candidates. 
 
 Third, A denomination that sees the full truth that religious 
 education is properly a specialized operation, to be guided by 
 scientific insight as well as inspired by religious motives, will 
 have to put the training of its directors of religious education 
 and of its editors and secretaries in this department upon a foot- 
 ing corresponding to the best practice in the preparation of 
 superintendents of public education. It is true that most of 
 
280 THE DENOMINATIONAL DEPARTMENT 
 
 our superintendents of public education have not had the best 
 preparation; boards of education are still obliged to employ the 
 effectively handy man, the faithful routine man, or the one- 
 sidedly progressive man where a real educator is needed. Just 
 so, the denominations must utilize in positions of educational 
 power many a man who, though facilities for adequate pro- 
 fessional training are still very scarce, and only yesterday did 
 not exist, has demonstrated in semi-technical ways a capacity for 
 leadership. But meantime men of this type see, and the de- 
 nominations must see, that these positions are bound to become 
 more and more technical. The ministry is to become differenti- 
 ated into at least three specialties, the pastorate, missionary 
 service, and education, and each will require, say, three years 
 of training governed strictly by foresight of the particular func- 
 tions of each. Already events have occurred in more than one 
 denomination that make it practically certain that the editorial 
 and administrative branches of Sunday school departments will 
 yet be put wholly upon this technical basis. As to the direc- 
 torate of religious education, one sign of the times is that the 
 men and women who form the Department of Church Directors 
 in the Religious Education Association have adopted as a qual- 
 ification for active membership a three years' theological course 
 that includes religious education, or else a two years' course in 
 an approved school of religious pedagogy. 
 
 Fourth, A denomination that commits itself to these policies 
 will discover that one of its chief difficulties concerns a supply 
 of competent teachers of religious education in colleges, theo- 
 logical seminaries, and training-schools. It goes without say- 
 ing that a college or seminary professorship of religious educa- 
 tion implies capacity for research as well as for teaching. Large 
 library facilities, and a school of religion in which principles 
 may be practised, demonstrated, and discovered by experiment 
 also loom before us as ultimately indispensable. In all these 
 respects we are in the first beginnings. We have to make our 
 way without precedents; heavy costs have to be added to in- 
 stitutional budgets; correlations with other departments of 
 instruction and research have to be created, and meantime the 
 
THE DENOMINATIONAL DEPARTMENT 281 
 
 field is calling aloud for results. Some of these problems will 
 be opened still further in the next chapter. Already, however, 
 it should be plain that the denominational problem reaches all 
 the way from the Sunday school to the theological seminary 
 and the university. 
 
 The denominational department of religious education as 
 an agency for social reconstruction. The conception that we 
 have now reached is that, just as the present denominational 
 department of foreign missions reaches its hand down to every 
 local society, outward to every mission field, and upward to the 
 recruiting and training of missionaries, so the denominational 
 department of religious education should stimulate the think- 
 ing of layman and minister alike, and should guide and organ- 
 ize practice in both the teaching of children and in the teaching 
 of their teachers. But there are various possible ambitions for 
 such a department within the scope of this general statement, 
 as: Ambition to be the exclusive purveyor of printed matter 
 for the Sunday schools of the denomination; ambition to fix 
 a particular curriculum upon the whole denomination ; ambition 
 to develop denominationalism by drilling children in it; or, 
 in contrast to all these, and in necessary opposition to them, 
 ambition to make of the entire denomination a devoted and 
 trained force for the Christian reconstruction of society in the 
 large. An intense, firmly knit denominational consciousness 
 can be neither approved nor disapproved until we know to what 
 it devotes its energies. If it merely feeds itself, and then uses 
 its ensuing strength to feed itself again; if its great contribu- 
 tion to the world is an invitation to join the denomination, then 
 the best that can be said for it is that it represents social develop- 
 ment, but arrested development. When the great social de- 
 votion comes, these half -gods will go. And the central function 
 of a department of religious education is to awaken the great 
 devotion. Therefore denominational consciousness will be 
 quickened into interdenominational consciousness, community 
 consciousness, world consciousness. This will be done through 
 the social content of lesson material; through provision for the 
 practice of social service; through community religious enter- 
 
282 THE DENOMINATIONAL DEPARTMENT 
 
 prises, such as teacher training, in contrast to merely denomina- 
 tional enterprises; through encouragement to experimentation 
 and variety as against uniformity; through participation of 
 denominational leaders in great non-denominational move- 
 ments for educational and social advance. Such a department 
 of religious education makes for denominational strength, but 
 not for denominationalism. It makes, rather, for the democracy 
 of God. 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 BEYOND THE DENOMINATIONS 
 
 The value of denominational variety in religious educa- 
 tion. We are now to consider the need of organizing religious 
 education upon a basis broader than that of the denomination. 
 The impHcation will be that there are some important things 
 that denominations as such are not best qualified to do. Lest 
 this implication should be interpreted as depreciation of active 
 denominational loyalty, let it be said in advance that some im- 
 portant ends are best attained through free variation. We 
 may think of the history of each religious body as an experi- 
 ment in social religion, and of the educational work of each as 
 an experiment in religious education. Now, in a matter as 
 complicated as this, a variety of experiments, each bringing 
 some particular factor or method into the foreground, has its 
 own value. At a later point in our discussion, Part V, we shall 
 see how, as a matter of fact, several types and tendencies in 
 Christian education have sprung up, each having something to 
 contribute toward the effective socialized type that is the ob- 
 jective point of otu* present aspiration. It is not to be supposed 
 that we can invent education any more than we can invent 
 family life. In both matters we have, rather, to reflect upon 
 what already exists in order to find elements worthy to be built 
 into a fairer structure, as well as to discover what to avoid. 
 We learn to educate by educating. It is by following out vari- 
 ous ideas that their value or their lack of value is demonstrated. 
 In fact, the " trial-and-error method" of learning applies not 
 only to a rat that is finding out how to get the cheese, not only 
 to a child who is adjusting himself to the laws of family life, but 
 also to educators who desire to know how best to educate. 
 
 283 
 
284 BEYOND THE DENOMINATIONS 
 
 The verdict of history upon the denominational phase of the 
 Christian reUgion is Hkely to be that in the narrower loyalties 
 men received a training in free co-operation that was an essen- 
 tial preliminary to the wider co-operations that lead on to a 
 just world organization. Hence, the part of wisdom is not to 
 lower the intensity of denominational loyalty, but to socialize 
 its content ever more and more. The reform of religious educa- 
 tion needs a background, not of denominational sloth or half- 
 heartedness, but of active devotion to whatever educational ideal 
 seems vital from the denominational point of view. " Devotion 
 to an ideal" means, of course, something more than speeding 
 up the machinery of a routine, something more than a prej- 
 udice charging into battle, something more than conceited com- 
 placency; it means, rather, the sort of conviction and of earnest- 
 ness that goes with the open eye, the eye that discriminates 
 between ideals, that recognizes Christliness beyond the pale, 
 yes, that looks ever for discrepancies between one's social prac- 
 tice and the Christian ideal. Denominational loyalty like this 
 will contribute to the wider organization of men, not hinder it. 
 But such devotion will draw upon extradenominational re- 
 sources. To these let us now turn. 
 
 A common social purpose tends to create common organs 
 for itself. To the extent that any denomination teaches the 
 Christian principle of social justice and of world society, it 
 creates a psychological necessity for organizations of the Chris- 
 tian consciousness more broad than the denomination. An indi- 
 vidualistic religion, whether of the sacerdotal, or of the dog- 
 matic, or of the experiential type, can express itself fully within 
 the walls of a sect. Its interest in the world at large is to get 
 men inside the same walls. But when one has the social mind 
 of Christ one's ambition is to give effect to it wherever and how- 
 ever one can in all the world by combining with any man who 
 is willing to go any distance, great or small, in the same direc- 
 tion. The achievement of a social interpretation of the gospel 
 leads right on toward the achievement of interdenominational 
 union of effort. Love has to produce organization, both be- 
 cause love makes men want to be in one another's company. 
 
BEYOND THE DENOMLMATIONS 285 
 
 and because it gives them a common purpose to do a large woTk. 
 One can easily witness in the Federal Council of the Churches 
 the contrast between the inhibiting effect of doctrinal sensitive- 
 ness and the emancipating effect of social purpose. The dele- 
 gates can heartily agree, for example, to work for a weekly rest 
 day, though they cannot agree upon the scriptural basis for 
 Sunday observance. 
 
 A social theory of religious education is bound to have its 
 eyes turned toward the wide organization of religious educa- 
 tion itself. Without at all overestimating the clarity or the 
 unity of social purpose in the Religious Education Association, 
 one can nevertheless see that the fundamental source of its 
 peculiar influence is its social spirit and outlook. Here is a 
 society that does not publish text-books, that does not control 
 any curriculum, that founds no schools, that has no authority 
 over or official entrance into any school, that was not founded 
 by the denominations, and is not supported by their funds but 
 chiefly by contributions from individuals belonging to the 
 underpaid salaried classes; yet this society has touched with a 
 quickening hand almost the whole of Protestant religious educa- 
 tion in this country and to some extent in foreign lands. It has 
 been able to do this, in the first place, because of the social, 
 co-operative spirit that was growing within the denominations. 
 The organization was a practical necessity because, scattered 
 through the religious bodies, there was a large and growing num- 
 ber of educators who had begun to conceive education in more 
 social terms than those of dogma or of ecclesiasticism, even in 
 terms of the needs of modern society. Hence it comes to pass 
 that the deliberations that have taken place under the auspices 
 of the Association have almost constantly placed side by side 
 problems of social advance and problems of educational organ- 
 ization, method, and material. If nothing more had been ac- 
 complished than to furnish a clearing-house of ideas for all sorts 
 of workers in religious education, the social significance would 
 have been large. But there is here, in addition, nothing less 
 than the forerunner of a unified educational consciousness 
 among the Protestant bodies. 
 
286 BEYOND THE DENOMINATIONS 
 
 What administrative organs this consciousness will produce 
 cannot be said as yet. The Sunday School Council of Evangeli- 
 cal Denominations, founded by the voluntary action of de- 
 nominational editors, publishers, and secretaries, may possibly 
 become a sort of federal legislative council for determining com- 
 mon policies, standards, and methods within a restricted group 
 of denominations. Inasmuch, however, as each body that is 
 represented in the Council has what amounts to a veto power 
 upon all acts, the policies that can be agreed upon will be 
 shaded toward an average or toward a mimimum; they will not 
 represent the best that the more progressive denominations 
 are already prepared to do. 
 
 Another interdenominational body, the Federal CounciFs 
 Commission on Christian Education, has begun to consider 
 important special problems. Here is an agency that might 
 conceivably do much to promote the socializing of religious 
 education, particularly through some close connection with the 
 other social activities of the Council. Yet we have to recognize 
 the significance of the fact that socially hesitant denominations 
 have equal rights with socially progressive ones in the Federal 
 Council, and that religious education is the point at which 
 social hesitancy is most likely to become social obstruction. 
 
 The oldest of all the interdenominational societies in the 
 field of religious education, the American Sunday School Union, 
 is devoting its energies chiefly to founding new Sunday schools 
 of an entirely conventional type. The International Sunday 
 School Association, which touches directly the largest number 
 of schools, and could conceivably lead in reform, is not only 
 subject to the same limitations upon progressiveness as the 
 Sunday School Council, but its policy has been so distinctly 
 and for so long a time controlled by religious conservatism that 
 does not think in either social or educational terms, that the 
 Association, instead of leading in the reconstruction of religious 
 education, has had to be painfully won to the cause. The 
 momentum of this conservatism has been lost, and the engine 
 has now been caught upon a dead centre. Yet here is a vast 
 amount of machinery for interdenominational co-operation. 
 
BEYOND THE DENOMINATIONS 287 
 
 machinery that is too valuable to be thrown upon the scrap- 
 heap, or to be kept at the less significant operations. It used 
 to be the proud boast of Association leaders that under its 
 guidance nearly all the Protestant Sunday schools of the coun- 
 try, and many in foreign parts, studied the same lesson on Sun- 
 day. This was interpreted as a marching together of the forces 
 of Protestantism. The bursting of this fancy through more 
 careful analysis of the educative process does not rebuke the 
 notion that Protestantism might really march together, nor does 
 it forbid the International Association to organize the marchers. 
 But concrete social goals are necessary. Bible study is not the 
 goal, but only a means thereto. If the religious earnestness 
 that has always characterized this old society should turn to 
 the social significance of the gospel, and the social ends of 
 religious education, there is no knowing what contributions to 
 the wider organization of Christian forces might result. 
 
 The basis for the wider organization of religious education is 
 a common purpose to do the will of God in establishing the de- 
 mocracy of God upon earth. Without denying social value to 
 unions formed upon a narrower platform than this, and without 
 impatience with ancient shibboleths that say nothing of mercy, 
 or of justice, or of world society, we must nevertheless see that 
 nothing but love is a sufficient organizing principle — not our 
 reasonings about love, but the act of loving, and the purpose to 
 go on loving to the uttermost. When we conceive religious 
 education as having the function of inspiring the young with 
 this Christian purpose, and of training them in methods of 
 making it effective in the world, then religious education will 
 create for itself organs as broad as the purpose. 
 
 This principle is illustrated in the Missionary Education 
 Movement. Here is an organization that is doing educational 
 work for and in many denominations as their common organ. 
 If I mistake not, this is the nearest approach that has yet been 
 made to an effective, working union of several denominations. 
 It has come to pass almost silently, and now that it is here it 
 has the "feel" of a natural and simple part of every-day life. 
 What has made this possible? The clarification of the mis- 
 
288 BEYOND THE DENOMINATIONS 
 
 slonary motive as that of outgoing, sacrificial love. Denomina- 
 tional differences do not keep us apart when we ask, What are 
 the conditions of child-life or of the life of women, or of the life 
 of men in central Africa or in western China, and what can we 
 do to improve these conditions? In short, the foundation for 
 a wide and effective organization of religious education is pre- 
 cisely the socializing of the content and purpose of our religion. 
 
 The wholesomeness of independent criticism and propa- 
 ganda, and the unwholesomeness of anjrthing like a de- 
 nominational educational trust. Anthropologists tell us that 
 one great reason of the backwardness of the native tribes in the 
 interior of Africa is that they have had so little intercourse wit :h 
 other peoples. Historians are accustomed to point out the 
 quickening of the mind that comes from contact of one civiliza- 
 tion with another. It is not less true that every religious 
 denomination requires for its own health plentiful contact with 
 standpoints and practices other than its own. Religious in- 
 breeding connotes, in the natural order of things, religious 
 deterioration. There is not a denomination to which inde- 
 pendent agitation and propaganda of religious education reaches 
 that has not cause to be thankful for it. This is true even from 
 the standpoint of denominationalism except when it assumes the 
 position of infallibility. Independent criticism, independent 
 publications, fresh experiments — these enable me to see, as I 
 could not by looking at myself, just what I am doing, and how 
 I can better attain my present ends. But independent agitation 
 has the added value of helping me to revise my ends. Unless I 
 claim infallibility, I must be ready to revise them, and I ought to 
 be thankful for stimulation to clear thinking and deep feeling 
 with respect to them. 
 
 A denominational department of religious education that en- 
 deavors to be self-sufficient is bound to injure its own cause. 
 Any combination of denominations that undertakes to build 
 walls that shall keep out everything that has not been produced 
 within the enclosure will fail, of necessity, to provide the best 
 possible. Love must keep open house to ideas as well as to 
 persons. It must receive as well as give. No group of denom- 
 
BEYOND THE DENOMINATIONS 289 
 
 inatlonal leaders is wise enough to prescribe the uniformly best 
 course of lessons, or the uniformly best lesson publications, 
 or the uniformly best schemes for teacher training for even one 
 denomination. There is no uniformly best for schools and 
 conditions that are not uniform. And if the uniformly best for 
 to-day could be discovered, to-morrow it would no longer be 
 so, but would be at some point or other a hinderance to the best. 
 
 Beyond all this we need to keep in mind the history of pub- 
 lishing houses that have enjoyed a monopoly, or anything ap- 
 proaching it, within a given ecclesiastical market. When busi- 
 ness processes and religious officialism blend, the possibilities 
 of confusion are immeasurable. Such a combination is, on 
 the whole, as deceptive as desire for riches. Not that religion 
 and business should be kept apart from each other. The crux 
 of the matter is in the monopolistic tendency; it is in the pur- 
 suit, in ecclesiastical business, of economic policies that are 
 socially objectionable anywhere. If we unite such policies 
 with religious education, we must curtail its social purpose from 
 the outset, and we subject it to the necessity of endless com- 
 promises. 
 
 The inference, which is confessedly harder to put into prac- 
 tice than is the policy of the closed market, is that religious 
 education will get on most rapidly toward its social goal when a 
 variety of influences has access to every church school. The 
 problem of adaptation to particular local conditions should be 
 kept constantly alive. The study of what other schools are 
 doing should be steadily encouraged. The habit of openness 
 toward new ideas and methods and materials, from whatever 
 source appearing, and some capacity for judging them, should 
 be one of the aims in the training of teachers and of leaders. 
 Such a policy will not only enable schools here and there to do 
 more excellent work; it will react favorably upon the denomi- 
 national or interdenominational publishing enterprise itself. 
 Greater acuteness and foresight in the securing of material, 
 greater attractiveness in the presentation of it, and greater 
 business skill in manufacturing and selling will be the effects. 
 
 The participation of universities in the making of religious 
 
290 BEYOND THE DENOMINATIONS 
 
 educators. When religious education acquires the purpose of 
 taking a definite part in the evolution of society as a whole, and 
 when, in order to fulfil this purpose, we undertake to lift the 
 teaching of religion from the plane of traditional routine to that 
 of a scientifically controlled process, we obligate ourselves to 
 cosmopolitanism of intellect as well as of heart. To make it 
 effective, we must go on to assume the university attitude 
 of freedom, of scientific method, of eagerness for new knowl- 
 edge and for the widest organization of knowledge. In the 
 preparation of leaders the top round of the ladder will not be 
 the training-school (under whatever name it goes), but the school 
 or combination of schools (under whatever name) that has the 
 university's range of instruction, together with the spirit of 
 research and facilities therefor. 
 
 The course of recent events leaves no ambiguity as to the 
 manner in which this requirement is to be met, namely, by com- 
 bining the work of a department or school of theology with the 
 work of a university department of education. The school of 
 theology will contribute, in general, an intensive study of 
 religion and of its works; the university department of educa- 
 tion will contribute to outlook upon education and to inlook into 
 the psychology of it. To be more specific, the range of oppor- 
 tunity for one who desires to become a technically accomplished 
 specialist in religious education may be expected to include the 
 following: 
 
 (a) The history of religion. 
 
 (6) The psychology of religion. 
 
 (c) The philosophy of religion. 
 
 (d) The sociology of religion. 
 
 (e) The general history of education. 
 
 (/) The special history of religious education. 
 
 (g) The psychology of education. 
 
 (h) The religious life of children and youth. 
 
 {{) Observation and analysis of the teaching process in the day school. 
 
 (j) Observation and analysis of the teaching process in the church 
 
 school or school of religion. 
 
 {k) The general principles and methods of school administration. 
 
BEYOND THE DENOMINATIONS 291 
 
 (/) The special methods of administration in religious education. 
 (m) Closely supervised practice in religious education, 
 (n) Provision for experimental study of religious education, 
 (o) The philosophy or general theory of religious education. 
 
 All these courses, it is assumed, will be on the university level 
 both with respect to standards of admission and of study, and 
 with respect to standards of scientific thoroughness. The order 
 in which the items are named is not intended to indicate any- 
 thing as to the arrangement of a student's program, but only 
 certain relations between the department of education and the 
 theological school. The relation here suggested between the va- 
 rious courses is that of close intertwining, or even of something 
 still more intimate. They are all related to one another as are 
 the organs of the human body when it lives and breathes. We 
 have here no mechanical juxtaposition of pieces of knowledge, 
 but the unity of a single purpose realizing itself in a complex 
 world. In the light of this purpose, it would be incorrect to 
 think of the courses in the department of education as funda- 
 mental, while those in the school of theology are accessory. 
 The courses in religious education, and in the study of religion, 
 not only make a direct attack upon data that are unconsidered 
 in the department of education (note, for example, b, d, and A), 
 but the practical methods in religious education, being con- 
 trolled by the aU-pervasive aim of promoting religious growth, 
 do not merely apply what has been learned in day-school experi- 
 ence. The impossibility, too, of ranking religious education as 
 a particular under a general conception of education that makes 
 no analysis of the religious life might seem to be obvious enough. 
 In addition, the theory of religious education tends, on the whole, 
 to be more inclusive than educational philosophy that lives in 
 constant contact with the restrictions of state education. 
 
 From all this it will appear that the whole curriculum for the 
 advance of learning and for the preparation of the highest ex- 
 perts in religious education must be lifted above denomina- 
 tionalism. Our task is never that of making merely denomina- 
 tional applications of non-religious educational theories and 
 
292 BEYOND THE DENOMINATIONS 
 
 methods. We must carry the unsectarianism of science into 
 our analysis of what is specifically religious. Psychology, 
 sociology, and experiment must speak in their own tongue with 
 respect to the most intimate things in religious experience, often 
 with respect to matters upon which denominations are sensitive. 
 If a denomination chooses to maintain a theological school in 
 which these things are promoted with hearty unreserve, this de- 
 nomination proves thereby that it is passing into the larger 
 society; it is losing its life and gaining life. 
 
PART V 
 
 EXISTING TENDENCIES IN CHRISTIAN 
 
 EDUCATION VIEWED FROM THE 
 
 SOCIAL STANDPOINT 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 THE ROMAN CATHOLIC TYPE 
 
 The purpose, scope, and spirit of Part V require a word of 
 advance explanation. The purpose is to set in high relief the 
 theory that has already been expounded. In accordance with 
 the principle, expressed at the beginning of the first chapter, 
 that theory arises within practice and is continuous with it, 
 I intend to show that the new educational point of view is, as 
 a matter of fact, arising within the churches. Like other new 
 inspirations, it has to struggle for utterance, oppose traditions, 
 and be opposed. It has to be refined in the furnace of experience 
 before it fully reveals its own nature. Into the ecclesiastical 
 furnace, then, let us take a look, seeking there for facts that 
 illustrate, either by similarity or by contrast, tendencies toward 
 a social view of religious education. 
 
 Some differences between Christian bodies will have to be 
 mentioned, and in some instances discrimination will have to 
 be made between tendencies that co-exist in the same body. 
 But no general survey of denominational types or tendencies 
 will be offered, nor will our evaluation of a particular educa- 
 tional thread constitute a judgment upon any church as a whole. 
 Indeed, the spirit of this analysis is not that of seeking to give 
 or to withhold credit, but rather that of seeing facts simply as 
 facts. Of course I shall make no concealment or even pretense 
 of reticence as to my own attitudes; in view of what precedes, 
 any such attempt, even if there were a motive for it, would be 
 futile. But I trust that to be possessed of a conviction will 
 not debar either author or reader from the recognition of facts 
 or of typical tendencies within facts. 
 
 295 
 
296 CATHOLICISM 
 
 Presuppositions of Roman Catholic education. No Chris- 
 tian body is more insistent upon education as a primary func- 
 tion of the church, and no one has proved the depth of its educa- 
 tional convictions by greater sacrifice, than the CathoUc Church 
 in the United States. No other church , holds with such una- 
 nimity a definite, logically articulated theory of religious educa- 
 tion, nor exhibits greater consistency in practice. This utter 
 coherence is due primarily to a firm grasp by the entire hier- 
 archy upon certain presuppositions. They may be conveniently 
 expressed as follows : 
 
 (1) Education is the transmission of a completed faith, not 
 participation in the evolution of a faith. In Catholic education 
 changes in method may occur within limits presently to be in- 
 dicated, but the purpose and the content are assumed to be 
 fixed and uniform for the whole world to the end of time. Rep- 
 etition, reproduction, prevention of change within the scope 
 of religion — this rather than experiment, new enterprise, or dis- 
 covery, is the spirit. 
 
 (2) The basal process in this transmission is intellectualistic. 
 The term "intellectualistic'' is here used because dogma is made 
 to precede and govern life. The processes of intelligence are 
 not employed primarily for defining an experience or a purpose 
 that the pupil already has or is in process of forming, but for 
 defining something entirely antecedent to such experience and 
 purpose, and intended as a control thereof. Archbishop Ire- 
 land puts the matter thus: "Nor is mere intellectual instruction 
 sufficient for the religious education of the child. Intellectual 
 instruction is necessary; it is the fount from which all else will 
 flow. But the child must be led as by the hand to put into daily 
 practice the truths with which its mind has been saturated."^ 
 How intellectualistic this notion of a preliminary mental sat- 
 uration is we shall see vividly when we examine the methods 
 employed for accomplishing it. 
 
 (3) Both dogma and rules of conduct are to he imposed upon 
 the pupil hy authority. This authority, Tnoreover, is lodged in 
 
 1 Bernard Feeney, The Catholic Sunday School (St. Loxiis, 1907), page x. 
 The italics are mine. 
 
CATHOLICISM 297 
 
 living men who announce and administer penalties for non- 
 conformity.^ Authority as teacher, authority to command what 
 is to be beHeved and done, descends in orderly gradation from 
 the Pope to every priest. There is always a living voice 
 that can declare the end of the matter in everything that 
 concerns faith and morals.^ This authority is not limited to 
 the declaration of general principles, but it goes on to hearing 
 confessions, imposing penance, and granting or withholding 
 absolution; to permitting or forbidding participation in sa- 
 cred rites held to have the greatest potency; finally, to con- 
 trol of the keys of eternal life. Whatever the method of teach- 
 ing employed, then, however gentle, however free from painful 
 restrictions, 'round about the whole are the adamantine walls 
 of psychic compulsion. Within these walls whatever is said 
 and done has within it the implication, the atmosphere, of 
 a government that is in no sense responsible to the gov- 
 erned. 
 
 Much Protestant education, too, has attempted to impose 
 the Christian faith by authority, but with an educationally 
 important difference. When authority is lodged in the Bible 
 rather than in a living teacher, variant interpretations of the 
 authority itself are possible. The Bible is powerless to prevent 
 them, or to punish, even so much as by a threat of withdrawing 
 spiritual privileges, any person who falls into error. Conse- 
 quently, Protestant teachers, all in all, instead of wielding power, 
 use persuasion, or seek a rational and essentially free assent. 
 As a rule, children know that inside the velvet glove there are 
 no fingers of steel. 
 
 Within Protestantism, consequently, there is more unreserved 
 
 i"If . . . by 'independence of mind' is understood unrestrained liberty 
 of thought in reUgious matters, it must be admitted that the Ratio Studiorum 
 and the whole Institute of the Society [of Jesus] are uncompromisingly op- 
 posed to it. and that the Jesuits always endeavored to suppress it. For they 
 are bound by their profession, and fully determined to uphold, defend, and 
 propagate revealed religion, as taught and interpreted by the Catholic Church. 
 In this they do not differ from other religious orders, nor from any consistent 
 Catholics." Article, "Jesuits" by R. Swickerath in Monroe's Cyclopedia of 
 Education. 
 
 2 According to the Catholic theory, no one but the Church has a right to teach 
 morals at all. 
 
298 CATHOLICISM 
 
 lodgment for the educational doctrine of Interest, and there is 
 readier assent to conforming material as well as method to needs 
 that appear in the pupil's own experience. The position of 
 Catholicism is that the child must be conformed to the material 
 and to the teacher who officially transmits it. "The position 
 which the director holds in the Sunday school is supreme. 
 He is the prime mover in everything. All that is done is in- 
 augurated by him. He is the ^ forma totius gregis.' The whole 
 machinery is guided by his touch, or rather, the entire mecha- 
 nism is in a manner of his creation. He is not only the rudder, 
 but his at the same time is the firm hand thereon. "^ "As to 
 the director, and this is as it should be, a step cannot be taken 
 in any path without confronting him. The children, to use 
 the scholastic phrase, are the prime matter; the director and 
 the teacher the substantial form which gives the Sunday school 
 its individual existence." ^ 
 
 Such a Sunday school, considered as a society, is an autoc- 
 racy, a benevolent one no doubt, but yet an autocracy, and 
 by this primarily must its capacity for social education be 
 determined. It is the purpose of Catholic education, the very 
 kernel of it, to perpetuate and make universal an autocratic 
 government of religious and ethical thinking and of religious 
 and moral conduct. That this is the very antipodes of the 
 aspiration for a democracy of God is obvious enough. And the 
 opposition does not cease at any supposed boundary between the 
 spiritual and the temporal. Such boundaries are mere conven- 
 tions; the facts show no such separation. For no laws of spiri- 
 tual life are clearer than the interconnectedness of soul and 
 body, the continuity of the ethical with the political, the suffoca- 
 tion of the higher life by economic injustice. Moreover, even 
 if the existence of these spiritual laws should oe denied, the fact 
 would remain that autocratic authority over matters of faith 
 and morals includes the authority to determine autocratically 
 what constitutes a matter of morals. In short, Catholic educa- 
 
 1 E. A. Halpin, The Method of the Catholic Sunday-School (New York, 1904), 
 
 p. 12. 
 
 aJWd., p. 40. 
 
CATHOLICISM 299 
 
 tion not only cannot be education for democracy ; it cannot fail 
 to educate against democracy. 
 
 The particular aims of Roman Catholic education. The 
 characteristic aims follow so directly from the presuppositions 
 that little more than an enumeration is necessary. 
 
 (1) To fix in the mind of the child church doctrine and tradition. 
 "The modern Sunday school, they say, was originated in 1781 
 by Robert Raikes. That is, of course, the Protestant Sunday 
 school. Non-Catholics have imposed the name on us all, yet 
 the difference between their work and ours is exceedingly great. 
 Our Sunday schools should be called catechism schools or 
 classes. We teach catechism. They teach, or explain, or — 
 God knows what — the Bible. Their Sunday school is a Bible 
 class. Ours is a catechism class. . . . The Bible holds a 
 place in our schools, but not that which belongs to the cate- 
 chism."^ 
 
 (2) To produce observance of particular rules with respect to 
 religious devotions and icith respect to conduct. Children are told 
 just what to do in church and elsewhere, and they are minutely 
 drilled in doing it. They are not left with general principles or 
 ideals, the applications of which they must work out by their 
 own thought and experiment, but with rules that specify the 
 very thing that is to be done or avoided, and with the habit 
 of doing it already formed. Thus it is that the Church seeks 
 to perpetuate itself unchanged. 
 
 (3) To fix the spirit and habit of full, unquestioning obedience to 
 the Church. In view of what has been said of the autocratic 
 character of Catholic education, it will be sufficient at this point 
 merely to indicate that the subjects of autocratic rule can be, 
 and are, trained to believe in, obey, and support it with unwaver- 
 ing conviction. How to produce such obedience was one of the 
 great and successfully solved problems of the founders of 
 Jesuit education. Loyola the soldier did not abandon militarism 
 when he turned from war to the Church; he merely transferred 
 the sphere of his militarism to the human spirit. In the Society 
 of Jesus he raised an army of perfectly regimented minds. They, 
 
 1 Halpin, p. 2. 
 
300 CATHOLICISM 
 
 in turn, have found in teaching their supreme opportunity for 
 producing a Hke regimented Church.^ 
 
 The fundamentals of method in Roman Catholic education. 
 It is not by any subtle trick, or ingenious device, or mysterious 
 influence that CathoHcism secures these results, but by the per- 
 sistent and organized use of simple and obvious methods. 
 
 (1) Habit-formation by drill processes is the pervading essence 
 of the whole. The laws of habit, let it be remembered, apply 
 to much more than overt acts. Attitudes as well as particular 
 acts can become habits, and attitudes include shades of feeling. 
 We can acquire an habitual interest in one thing, so that we 
 notice it when it is present, and an habitual indifference to an- 
 other, so that its presence goes unnoticed. We can acquire hard 
 and fast associations of ideas, so that A always brings up P, 
 which is agreeable, while B always recalls Q, which is disagree- 
 able. In this way we can go on to form a habit of thinking thus 
 or so of anything, and such an intellectual habit may become 
 so firm that the habitual conclusion has the force of a self- 
 evident presupposition. Conscience, taste, and in fact stand- 
 ards of judgment in every sphere can become petrified as habits. 
 A habit of self-limitation — or of submission to the will of an- 
 other, can become so ingrained as to seem second nature. It 
 is by the continuous use of this principle that Catholic educa- 
 tion gets its results. It is a system of habit-formation. Let 
 us, then, glance at two or three phases of the process. 
 
 (2) Hence the great prominence of memory drill upon verbal 
 formulce. The great propositions of the faith are not reserved 
 
 1 Now and then the question is asked how the Roman priesthood is kept 
 in intellectual subservience to the papacy. How came it to pass that modem- 
 ism, for example, was so easily suppressed ? Why were there not more martyrs 
 to it, at least? Especially, what kept modernism from raising its head at all 
 in this country, where freedom of thought is supposed to be breathed in the 
 very atmosphere? How can educated men who have come into contact 
 ■with modern historical and scientific knowledge remain so imaffected by it? 
 What can induce them to abjure the right to think for themlseves? The 
 major part of the answer is that the Catholic system of education is organized, 
 from the infant class to the theological seminary, under the all-pervading 
 aim of producing obedience as a permanent frame of mind. On the whole, 
 the system secures what it seeks. It produces genuine obedience, not merely 
 the pretense of it; actual conformity in thinking, not duplicity or self-division 
 except now and then; submission so complete as to be practically painless. 
 
CATHOLICISM 301 
 
 until the child has a religious experience that requires them for 
 its expression; they are not reserved even until the child can 
 understand them. A beginning of habituation and of con- 
 formity is possible even in advance of understanding and of 
 experience. " In the primary Sunday school grades, the main 
 object is to indelibly fasten on the memory the truths of faith, 
 and to impart such explanation as the young mind is capable 
 of receiving. It might be said that it is mere surface work. 
 The chief task lies in giving the child a memory grasp of Catholic 
 doctrine. It is an all-important achievement. It is essential. 
 One need not care, for the very young, how parrot-like may be 
 their knowledge; a pervading familiarity with the text is the 
 beginning of all after knowledge, and without it there is danger 
 of inaccurately obtaining it, which is pernicious in the extreme, 
 and which is worse than ignorance. It is better not to know 
 in these momentous matters than to misstate."^ Since exact 
 conformity is the end sought, the stress is never removed from 
 the verbal forms in which the Church has clothed her teachings. 
 That is, habit-formation, not independent judgment, remains 
 the essence of the method to the very end. " Children, unless 
 they know their catechism verbatim may be said to have no 
 knowledge of it whatever. They have not laid that foundation 
 without which any superstructure, durable or fair to look upon 
 is, if not absolutely impossible, at least so difficult as to demand 
 superhuman effort." 2 
 
 (3) Expression from the pupil takes tJie form of reproduction 
 of what he has been told rather than that of "free self-expression.'* 
 If we desire free self-expression from the pupil, we place him 
 in a situation that is likely to call forth a spontaneous reac- 
 tion that is of worth, one that will help him to find himself, and 
 then we let the reaction come — we do not prescribe it, require it, 
 or even tell the pupil in advance what we hope for. Hence pu- 
 pils' opinions, likes and dislikes, approvals and disapprovals, 
 become a part of the learning process. Or, if the situation 
 presents a problem for solution, rather than an object to be 
 appreciated, the pupils' work will show doubts, guesses, tenta- 
 
 1 Halpin. p. 19. » Ibid.. 24. 
 
302 CATHOLICISM 
 
 live inferences, very likely dissent from the teacher, but also 
 the joy of discovering something for oneself. This brief and 
 partial statement is sufficient to illustrate the methods of self- 
 expression. Now, when we examine the work books of pupils 
 from carefully managed Catholic Sunday schools, we find little 
 of this, but much telling back of what the teacher or the text- 
 book has told. The purpose, in fact, is not discovery, not train- 
 ing the pupil to see for himself whether or not the truth is as 
 it is said to be, not the solution of problems by the pupil. 
 The Church has already solved his problems, and she now un- 
 dertakes to transfer ready-made solutions to him. Hence the 
 pressure of the school upon him is toward the most accurate 
 possible reproduction of what he has been told.^ 
 
 (4) Gradation of material, in the proper sense of "gradation^* 
 does not exist, but rather fuller and fuller treatment of the same 
 outline, with some change from sensuous to logical modes of 
 impression. Pupils are graded to the extent of being arranged 
 in five, six, or eight age groups. The grouping is determmed to 
 some extent by the pupil's changing relations to the Church, 
 as his first communion and his confirmation. But for all ages 
 the essential content of instruction is, as has been indicated 
 already, the catechism. The catechism is the curriculum. It 
 is, of course, not at all a transcript of a child's spiritual growth, 
 but a thought structure built by adults to meet certain strains 
 felt by adults. Moreover, the order in which it is presented is 
 not determined by freely picking out the parts that have the 
 closest relation to experience at this or that age, for the main 
 outline of the whole is presented at every age. One writer, 
 after saying that during each year of his Sunday school life each 
 child should study or review in regular succession "at least all 
 the fundamental truths" of his religion, recommends that in 
 all the grades the same topic be studied each Sunday, the dif- 
 
 1 That this is characteristic even of higher classes is clear from Halpin's 
 description of a class in Higher Catechism. The same principle of method 
 prevails in the specific training for the priesthood also. When we act upon 
 the assumption that the function of reason is to confirm conclusions already 
 held as final, we may, indeed, grow in logical nimbleness, but it is the nimble- 
 ness of habitual co-ordinations that have merely extended their range and 
 thereby sohdifled themselves. 
 
CATHOLICISM 303 
 
 ference between the grades being simply one of simplicity and 
 extent of the material. This is called a "graded system," 
 whereas it is in fact a uniform system.^ 
 
 At first this abstract material is presented to a considerable 
 extent as something to say in connection with a particular re- 
 ligious act which the teacher takes pains to have the child per- 
 form, or as a statement of the meaning of some sensible object 
 connected with worship. Later the catechism meets the pupil 
 as a system to be grasped as one interconnected whole. 
 
 The early, and in fact never-ceasing association of dogmas 
 with sensible objects and with particular acts of devotion 
 is undoubtedly effective for the purpose for which it is used. 
 The sense of reality that attaches to the impressive sights and 
 sounds within the church, and to the acts that one does there, 
 attaches also, under the laws of habit, to the formulae that are 
 used in connection therewith. What I and the other wor- 
 shippers are doing, what the priest is doing, what the pictures, 
 statues, and vestments signif}^ — as far as I think of this at all 
 (and the teacher sees to it that I do think of it) I think of it 
 in the terms that are drilled into my mind by repetition. This 
 is what it all is to me. To a considerable extent, even methods 
 that are relatively external and mechanical have this result. 
 But when spiritually minded teachers, by personal example, 
 and by careful control of conditions, produce in their pupils 
 the emotions of awe and of mystery, some real penitence, some 
 real joy in forgiveness, some fear of penalty and some sense of 
 security from it, and withal the comfortable realization that we 
 know how to be safe in life and in death, then pupils tend to 
 identify their very selves with the system that imposes itself 
 upon them. 
 
 1 p. J. Sloan, The Sunday-School Director's Guide to Success. New York, 
 1909. 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 THE DOGMATIC PROTESTANT TYPE 
 
 Within Protestantism various educational t3rpes coeidst. 
 It is not possible to speak of "the" Protestant type of rehgious 
 education as we have done of the Cathohc type. For not only 
 are there many sorts of Protestantism, but within each Protes- 
 tant body, at least within the larger bodies, variety, ferment, 
 fresh experimentation are characteristic, and consequently at 
 times the strain of conflicting convictions. Catholic education 
 is a close-knit system; Protestant education is a conglomerate, 
 several different types being found side by side, even within the 
 same denomination. To speak of "the dogmatic Protestant 
 type," therefore, or of the other types that will engage our 
 attention in the following chapters, is not to characterize any 
 denomination by a single educational tendency. It will be 
 necessary to draw examples from the practices or from the official 
 utterances of this or that body, it is true, but the reader should 
 bear in mind that in each instance a single item has been taken 
 from a group of jostling tendencies. It should be noted, more- 
 over, that such terms as "dogmatic," "ritualistic," "evangel- 
 ical," and "liberal" are intended to be descriptive only; they 
 are not epithets that carry either approval or opprobrium. For 
 the purpose is not to judge theologies or forms of ecclesiastical 
 life as such, but only to understand the educational tendencies 
 and affiliations that belong to them. 
 
 Comparison of the dogmatic Protestant t3rpe of religious 
 education with the Catholic type. Protestant education is 
 dogmatic when it is controlled by these presuppositions: That 
 there is a finite, historical organ that exercises divine authority 
 upon earth; that this authority imposes upon men a change- 
 less faith which it is the function of religious education to 
 
 304 
 
DOGMATISM 305 
 
 transmit; and that education transmits it primarily in the form 
 of certain propositions. That this educational point of view 
 exists in large Protestant areas needs no argument, nor is the 
 affinity with Catholicism at all obscure. 
 
 (1) There is affinity with Catholic education to the extent that 
 external authority is propagated by intellectual isiic drill processes. 
 As in Catholicism, so in much Protestantism, we find drill upon 
 set formulae, as of a catechism; the persistent use of doctrinal 
 rather than descriptive terms for experience, both the experi- 
 ences recorded in the Bible and those of present-day Christians; 
 and a tendency, which will be exhibited in some detail in a 
 subsequent section, to bend the curriculum as a whole to the 
 outlines of a dogmatic system. If this were the end of the mat- 
 ter, an educational appraisement of it would be easy. But 
 Protestant dogmatism, even of the most rigorous sorts, includes 
 in its doctrines certain views of the church, of the Bible, and of 
 the religious life that involve decisive modifications. 
 
 (2) But the Protestant abnegation of all claims to infallibility 
 on the part of the church changes the relation between teacher and 
 pupil from that of commanding and obeying to that of helping and 
 being helped, which makes for democracy. The Protestant teacher, 
 just because he is Protestant, obligates himself to regard the 
 pupil's interests and modes of mental assimilation. If Prot- 
 estantism tends to prize unduly a winsome personality in a 
 teacher, nevertheless the social tendency even of this is toward 
 friendliness between equals. 
 
 (3) The ascription of authority to the Bible rather than to the 
 church turns attention to a literature that is predominantly a tran- 
 script of life rather than a body of doctrine. Therefore Protestant 
 emphasis upon Bible study tends to counteract Protestant dogma- 
 tism. The Catholic writer, quoted in the last chapter, who con- 
 trasted the teaching of catechism with the teaching of the 
 Bible, did not exaggerate the difference. The Bible is education- 
 ally as different from catechisms as the affection of a mother 
 toward her baby is different from the law of the state that for- 
 bids a mother to let her offspring starve. And the more objec- 
 tive our study of the Bible becomes, the more it gives the pupil 
 
306 DOGMATISM 
 
 an impression of moving among men like himself. The desire 
 of a teacher to make a passage interesting or vivid lures him 
 toward precisely the features of it that the pupil can appre- 
 ciate through his own experience and observation. It is true 
 that dogmatism, phrasing in its own way whatever it touches, 
 and insistent upon illustrating its own convictions by ancient 
 life that was unconscious of them, tends constantly to depress 
 the vitality of Bible study. But its insistence upon the Bible 
 as the very word of God in due time reacts in the interest of life. 
 
 (4) The intellectualism of dogmatic teaching is further Trwdijied 
 by efforts to induce a personal religious experience. The most 
 dogmatic Protestant teaching, in the same breath in which it 
 assumes that certain beliefs are essential to the Christian life, 
 warns the pupil that he can be spiritually dead even though 
 his beliefs are perfectly correct. The Catholic child is taught 
 that he can be saved by conformity; the Protestant child is 
 told the exact contrary. The Catholic child is told that God 
 is present in the mass; the Protestant child is told that God's 
 presence is to be discerned In the heart. We shall presently dis- 
 cover that dogmatic Protestantism Is restrained from reaping the 
 whole educational advantage of its belief in Christian experience. 
 But we can see at once that to teach the pupil to establish a 
 direct relation between himself and God, a relation the nature 
 of which the pupil himself judges, is to turn attention once 
 more away from dogma and authority toward life that can easily 
 take a democratic form. 
 
 Protestant dogmatism camiot accept whole-heartedly the 
 principle of gradation of the material of instruction. We 
 have seen that Catholic education repeats the main outlines of 
 Catholic dogma from department to department of the Sunday 
 school. This is necessary because the end to be attained is 
 utter habituation of the mind. Protestant dogmatism tends 
 in the same direction, but for the reasons that have just been 
 given, is not so thoroughgoing. Here is the meaning of the half- 
 acceptance, half -rejection of graded lessons by certain Protes- 
 tant bodies. The fundamental idea of gradation is that the 
 pupil is to grow from within; dogmatism desires the pupil to 
 
DOGMATISM 307 
 
 conform increasingly to something tliat is without. Growth from 
 within presupposes freedom, and it invites variation. To pro- 
 vide for growth is to furnish changing sorts of food as capacity 
 for assimilation changes; it is to feed spontaneous interests 
 as they arise. Habit-formation is involved here, of course, but 
 also the free variation toward which dogmatism is necessarily 
 apprehensive. True gradation of material aims to call into 
 play whatever capacity for judgment and discovery the pupil 
 has, and by exercising this capacity at its various levels of 
 growth to bring it finally to maturity. Whole-hearted dogma- 
 tism like that of the Catholic Church will have none of this; 
 the modified dogmatism of some Protestants fears and opposes 
 it, but from no defined or definable educational standpoint that 
 can satisfy the other demands of Protestantism even of the 
 dogmatic type.^ 
 
 No oflftcial body has been at greater pains to state the issues 
 here involved than certain committees that reported to the Gen- 
 eral Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States 
 of America, in 1913. Let us ask, then, what conceptions of 
 education are here expressed or implied, first premising on our 
 own part that our quest is not to determine the educational 
 status of an ecclesiastical body, but solely to understand educa- 
 
 1 The Sunday-School Committee of the General Synod of the Evangelical 
 Lutheran Church in the United States of America, in a report made in 1913 
 criticises "the forced pedagogical theory that the child itself is the centre 
 around which the teaching of the Bible must adjust itself at no matter whab 
 sacrifice of truth. We strongly advocate a system of graded lessons," the 
 report continues, "but the whole spirit and the doctrinal position of our 
 Church is against a system of grading which seeks merely to interest the child 
 by fanciful and far-fetched interpretations of Scripture, by attempting to catch 
 the child by making the stories of the Bible simple myths, by extra-biblical 
 lessons from nature, from Ufe, from history. . . . We are persuaded that in 
 the Church, as in the family, strong Christian men and women are made of 
 the children, not by giving them always what they want and what win enter- 
 tain them, but what they need." See Proceedings of the General Synod, 1913. 
 pp. 114-117. The real issues here involved would have been far more sharply 
 drawn if the report had been a little more accurate and a little more thorough 
 in its contrast between the theory that "the child itself is the centre" and the 
 theory that children are best educated by "giving them what they need." 
 What we have here is first, a misleading caricature of the doctrine of interest, 
 with no recognition of any truth at all in it, and second, an ambiguous ref- 
 erence to what children need. If the ambiguity were cleared up, "what the 
 children need" would turn out to be, of course, some adult point of view 
 to which the children are expected to conform. 
 
308 DOGMATISM 
 
 tlonal tendencies that are inherent in a certain type of Prot- 
 estant thought and practice. First, then, we find approval 
 of graded lessons. The Standing Committee on the Board of 
 Publication and Sabbath-School Work "heartily approves of 
 the general plan of graded lessons for use in churches preferring 
 them to the Uniform Series."^ But a conviction is expressed 
 that "the present lesson helps in the graded system may be 
 substantially improved," and the following principles are offered 
 for guidance in a proposed revision of certain parts and new 
 publication in others: 
 
 (1) Simplicity of expression and clearness of definition. (2) 
 Complete harmony, in all exposition and definition, with the sys- 
 tem of evangelical faith accepted by our Presbyterian Chm*eh; 
 and especially with regard to the divine inspiration of the Scrip- 
 tures as the supreme revelation of God, the deity of Jesus Christ 
 as God in the flesh, coequal with the Father and coeternal, the in- 
 herent sinfulness of human nature and the consequent need of a 
 spiritual regeneration, and the atoning merit of Christ as a Saviour 
 from sin. And, further, that in the use of extra-biblical lessons, the 
 honor of the Scriptures be maintained in this way : Where so-called 
 "nature studies" or "stories" are used in the earlier grades (be- 
 ginners, primary and junior) they are to be used in connection 
 with definite selections of Scripture, and then only in the form 
 of pictures or emblems to illustrate moral or spiritual truths; 
 and that in the use of biography or history, or ethics or social 
 science, a definite portion of Scripture be used as a basis of the 
 lesson, the biography or historical event or principle of ethics 
 or of social science being used to illustrate the Word of God and 
 confirm its fundamental teachings. 
 
 The last clause is an almost exact reproduction of the scho- 
 lastic conception of education. Each study is conceived of, 
 not as an unforced exercise of intelligence and conscience upon a 
 given piece of human experience, not as a means of developing 
 judgment and power to discover, but as a means of illustrating 
 
 1 Report presented to and approved by the General Assembly at Atlanta, 
 May 21, 1913. 
 
DOGMATISM 309 
 
 and confirming certain fixed teachings — In this case certain in- 
 terpretations of Scripture. 
 
 The relation between "complete harmony" with the ac- 
 cepted system of evangelical faith and the theory of gradation 
 is revealed more distinctly in another report made to the same 
 General Assembly by a Special Committee on Graded Lessons. 
 
 We recommend the revision of the Beginners', Primary, ami 
 Junior Lesson Helps so as to express with greater clearness the 
 fundamental Scripture doctrines. ... (1) The Scriptures as an 
 authoritative revelation from God. (2) The sinfulness of human 
 nature and the need of regeneration. (3) The atonement offered 
 by Jesus Christ. 
 
 Here we have a perfectly explicit proposal to teach the In- 
 dicated dogmas to children from four to twelve years of age. 
 The child is to be bent to the material by a process of reiteration 
 as in Catholic education. 
 
 The committee goes on to express dissatisfaction with the 
 view of religious growth that is stated in one of the books for 
 teachers; the view, in a word, that the child's spiritual life may 
 be made continuous, so that conversion, as it is ordinai'ily 
 understood, will not be necessary. Inasmuch as the committee 
 intimates that this may occur under favorable conditions, though 
 only through the regenerating work of the Spirit of God, we 
 might expect the committee to indicate some possible conception 
 of how the divine Spirit might use the educative process as a 
 whole. Instead the committee desires to have incorporated in 
 the "Forewords" and in the instructions to teachers "sugges- 
 tions on the best methods of leading scholars to Christ." The 
 tendency here manifested to add religious appeal to educative 
 processes instead of making these processes themselves, all of 
 them, religiously vital, is an inevitable corollary of the in- 
 tellectualistic, because dogmatic, approach to the curriculum. 
 When teaching is conceived primarily as instruction in dogmas, 
 something has to be added, of course, in the interest of religious 
 living. To this dualism in religious education it will be neces- 
 sary to return in a later section. 
 
310 DOGMATISM 
 
 The dogmatic Protestant type tends to separate religious 
 life from religious instruction. We have just now touched 
 upon an instance in which, after recommending that certain dog- 
 mas be taught to children of four to twelve years, a committee 
 advises also that the teachers be instructed in " the best methods 
 of leading scholars to Christ.'^ Here "coming to Christ" is 
 treated as a thing by itself, and not involved in religious instruc- 
 tion as such. This type of educational thinking goes on, more- 
 over, to separate training in the duties of the Christian life 
 from both instruction and coming to Christ. "Surely," says 
 the committee, "the prime object of the Sunday school is to 
 lead the scholars to Christ the Saviour, and then to train them 
 in the Christian life with its privileges and duties." "And 
 then'' to train them in the practice of religion. The entire 
 scheme includes, it now appears, three stages or parts: Firsts 
 drill in the dogmas; Second, leading to Christ; Third, training 
 in Christian living. Here we have simply one thing added to 
 another — first beliefs that are not acts of consecration, then a 
 kind of omnibus surrender to Christ, then Christian living in the 
 world. 
 
 In the background of this scheme is the fundamental assump- 
 tion that knowledge or thought is a thing per se that is to be 
 applied by the will, which is another thing per se. Moreover, 
 the will is taken as a general or abstract entity apart from the 
 particular desires and purposes that spring up in one's experi- 
 ence of human society. Hence the great choice of Christ, the 
 major loyalty that is aimed at, is treated as an event or experi- 
 ence by itself, and duties to one's fellows as a distinct and sub- 
 sequent thing. 
 
 If these underlying assumptions of dogmatic religious educa- 
 tion are mistaken; if thought itself is a phase of active adjust- 
 ment to the conditions of life, so that religious beliefs held ante- 
 cedently to religious living are only pseudo-thinking; if, further, 
 the will comes to itself in and through particular social inter- 
 actions, not antecedently thereto, then, if we are to have a vital 
 and organically unified religious education, we must begin with 
 the formation of a social will through the performance of par- 
 
DOGMATISM 311 
 
 ticular social acts out of which may grow Christian social 
 habits; we must go on to make these practices thinking reac- 
 tions — a discriminative, foresighted, information-seeking Chris- 
 tian faith; through practice of the lesser consecrations we must 
 develop power for the larger ones, and through the experienced 
 validity of the Christian purpose in social action, we must reach 
 the heights and the depths of Christian belief. Leading pupils 
 to Christ will then no longer be separated from, but fused with, 
 leading them into Christlike social living. Thus the pupil's 
 social experience under the leadership of Christ will be no " and 
 then," no department of religious education, but the very lungs 
 with which religious nurture draws in the breath of its life. 
 
 Social tendencies of the dogmatic Protestant type of 
 religious education. Any complete inventory of the social 
 tendencies of the type of religious education that has now been 
 described would have to include a survey of the social content 
 of the systems of doctrine that are in control in various de- 
 nominations or Sunday schools. What level of sociality is 
 reflected in the idea of God that is taught to the children? 
 In the conception of sin ? In the notion of the kingdom of God ? 
 In the particular duties that are inculcated? In the standards 
 of church life? Obviously such a survey is impossible in this 
 place. The most that can be done is to analyze social tendencies 
 that are inherent in the dogmatic point of view as it is held in 
 common by various sorts of Protestants, and in practices that 
 are common. 
 
 (1) Teaching the child that he stands in direct relations to God, 
 that isy relations not necessarily mediated by priest or by church, 
 tends to liberate the mind from all tyrannies, spiritual and political. 
 This teaching as to the accessibility of God is, of course, not dis- 
 tinctive of any single type of Protestantism; it is a common 
 Protestant conviction. It is mentioned here in connection with 
 the dogmatic type of Protestantism because, as a matter of 
 fact, dogmatism here limits itself, actually renounces the ab- 
 solutism, which in practice is the autocratic rule, that character- 
 izes Catholic education. When we tell a child that he can carry 
 everythmg in his own way directly to a God who will fully under- 
 
312 DOGMATISM 
 
 stand, we invite a human being to think of everything from the 
 divine point of view that develops in his own mind as he prays. 
 From the judgments that thus arise the church and its dogmas 
 have no ultimate immunity. To peoples and classes that have 
 been touched by this Protestant teaching, God is a refuge and 
 strength against all oppression. The struggle for liberty, re- 
 ligious, political, or economic, is sanctified; it becomes, not the 
 impiety of mere revolt against social order, not the letting loose 
 of class hatred, but a solemn consecration to the eternal purpose 
 of the world. The possibilities that lie open in this direction 
 are, however, seriously limited by other parts of the dogmatic 
 scheme. 
 
 (2) But the lack of social deliberation tends to isolate the in- 
 dividual, and to open the way for indimdualistic conceptions of 
 duty. The dogmatic t^^pe of education causes the pupil to be- 
 come orthodox by a process of habituation, not by the give-and- 
 take of a group of inquiring minds. Real deliberation of a social 
 sort upon doctrine was finished in some council of long ago. The 
 individual of to-day can make his complete response to instruc- 
 tion, can become and remain orthodox, without a single act of 
 co-operation with anybody. 
 
 This tendency to isolation does not stop with beliefs. For 
 dogmatism teaches duties also by authority, either the authority 
 of a command that is supposed to have been directly revealed, 
 or that of an inference drawn from an authoritative doctrine. 
 The result is a set of rules or of sentiments where there should 
 be training in the analysis of social relations and in co-operative 
 work for improving them. One can hold the rule or feel the 
 sentiment in isolation. Hence, in part, the amount of non- 
 cohesive, non-co-operative, socially ineffective goodness among 
 church members. 
 
 Nor is this the end of the matter. In the absence of social 
 deliberation upon the meaning and the ends of life, there is 
 no adequate check to self-deception with respect to the issues 
 involved in our social conflicts and in our social aspirations. 
 Many a man who is devotedly religious is stiff-necked in social 
 relations simply because in early life he was taught rules when 
 
DOGMATISM 313 
 
 he should have learned the lesson of conferring with one's fel- 
 lows whenever their interests are involved. Christians of this 
 sort are accustomed to stand upon tlicir rights, that is, upon 
 precedents that give them some individualistic advantage; 
 therefore such Christians let social wrongs also follow precedent. 
 It is not uncommon — is it not in the natural order of things ? — 
 for stiff economic and political conservatism to be united in 
 the same person with intense dogmatic religion, and to fuid sup- 
 port therein. 
 
 (3) To make the Bible the 'practically exclusive source of ma- 
 terial is to keep the attention of pupils fixed upon prcdemocratic 
 social conditions. Through the material of the curriculum we 
 lead the pupil to notice and appreciate standards of human 
 goodness, and to think of these standards as the will of God. 
 If, now, the curriculum takes its instances of goodness from 
 tribal relations, and from life under monarchical nationalism; 
 if the virtues of the warrior are often to the fore, while the vir- 
 tues of a free citizenship have not as yet even dawned upon the 
 horizon of the good man's hopes; if loving-kindness must still 
 express itself almost exclusively in the narrower personal re- 
 lations and in relief, while causes of wide-spread woe remain un- 
 guessed and unsought for; if social justice, though hot against 
 those who profit by the exploitation of human beings, sees no 
 way to endow the exploited with civil authority to control the 
 conditions of the common life; if the democratic spirit, as far 
 as it is present at all in individuals, finds no way to organize 
 itself politically, or even to conceive of a civil state through 
 which it could utter itself — if the curriculum has such a limited 
 outlook upon Christian character, how can it present, without 
 stammering and without ambiguity, the fully Christian ideals 
 of a democracy of God ? 
 
 It is true that even the crude social conditions of early He- 
 brew history and legend yield nuggets of gold for the religious 
 teacher. Nothing, perhaps, more effectively assists in the 
 analysis of certain simple relations between individuals, and of 
 certain relations within the family, than some of the Old Testa- 
 ment stories. There is, moreover, no absolute break between 
 
314 DOGMATISM 
 
 the virtues of a hospitable sheik, or those of a generous-hearted 
 mountain chieftain, and the virtues of a citizen when he votes 
 to tax himself for the improvement of the public schools. 
 Nevertheless there are two unescapable limitations upon the 
 Old Testament as curriculum material for the development of 
 intelligent Christian purpose: 
 
 (a) The characters and the incidents of the Old Testament 
 that can be used to advantage have to be selected out of a mass 
 that contains, because of the level of the whole, much unusable 
 material. Even in circles that are controlled by the doctrine 
 that every word of the Bible is infallible divine revelation, such 
 selection has already gone far. There is discreet hesitation to 
 take upon Christian lips many a word and sentiment that are 
 said to be the word and the sentiment of God. There is a 
 tacit understanding that tender minds shall be shielded from 
 much of the moral crudity from which Yahweh is not repre- 
 sented as shrinking at all. But the selection must be much more 
 rigorous than it is at present if the formation of really Christian 
 standards of life and really Christian conceptions of God is to 
 be our dominating purpose. 
 
 (6) Even the Old Testament worthies with whom we are 
 glad to have the children keep company, will have to be used 
 negatively, as well as positively, that is, to point what is not 
 Christian as well as what is. So will their notions of Yahweh 
 illuminate the character of God by contrast. Their virtues and 
 their faith in God both reflect the social assumptions of their 
 time. It is by measuring these men by the standards of their 
 time, in fact, that we learn how great they were. When we 
 idealize them as though they were true Christians we gain noth- 
 ing, and we lose an opportunity for making Christian standards 
 clear by contrast with these earlier and lower levels of society. 
 It is necessary to be on our guard lest pre-Christian conceptions 
 of God become a part of a child's faith when he listens to the 
 beautiful Old Testament stories. In fact, only in the greatest 
 utterances of the greatest of the prophets do we find the dis- 
 tinctively Christian consciousness of God emerging. 
 
 The spirit of Jesus, in short, is the social standard by which 
 
DOGMATISM 315 
 
 everything else in the Bible is to be weighed and measured. The 
 spirit of Jesus. Here a distinction is necessary with respect 
 to the educational use of the New Testament. Jesus, too, died 
 without having witnessed a single instance of political enfran- 
 chisement in the democratic sense. Apparently he did not 
 foresee the possibility that brotherhood should achieve a non- 
 paternalistic expression in the civil state. We look to him in 
 vain for political wisdom — that is, guidance with respect to 
 how to organize the good will in an effective social order. So 
 obvious is this that our leaders have many times warned us that 
 Jesus was not a teacher of economics or of politics or of sociology, 
 just as they have warned us also that following Jesus is not the 
 same as imitating him, as with respect to celibacy, for example. 
 The social leadership of Jesus resides in his spirit of social good 
 will, his simple appreciation of every one as a neighbor, his trust 
 that God, who is love, will not let us go until we have become a 
 brotherhood. Here brotherly love is all one with faith and hope. 
 The most daring and the most unflinching social teaching will 
 never cease to look back to Jesus. But if it sees Jesus it will 
 look, with him, to the future. It will breathe his spirit, but it 
 will not stop with his words. " I have yet many things to say 
 unto you," the Fourth Gospel reports him as saying, "but ye 
 cannot bear them now." The spirit of Jesus is so forward- 
 looking, so creative, so inexhaustible that the Bible cannot 
 possibly be a sufficient text-book of Christian living. To tie 
 religious education down to it, as dogmatism desires to do, 
 would make us like those who are ever learning but never able 
 to come to the truth — ever learning to love, but ever permitting 
 the social order to defeat love. 
 
CHAPTER XXII 
 THE RITUALISTIC PROTESTANT TYPE 
 
 Fundamental characteristics of the type. By the ritualistic 
 type of Christian education is meant that which lays particular 
 emphasis upon the pupil's relation to the church as a society 
 that worships by prescribed forms. Though this characteriza- 
 tion lacks the precision of an exact boundary-line, and though 
 it does not suffice to describe the whole educational life of any 
 Christian body, it does, nevertheless, identify a particular ten- 
 dency that exists in various bodies. In the Protestant Epis- 
 copal Church, to take the most obvious example, we find relig- 
 ious education conditioned fundamentally by the fact that every 
 baptized infant is, by virtue of his baptism, a member of the 
 church. It follows as a matter of course that the aim of relig- 
 ious nurture is to help the child to realize increasingly the mean- 
 ing of this already existing relation, and to perform more and 
 more the acts that it entails, until the full stature of a churchman 
 is reached. The meaning of the whole is set forth briefly in 
 the creed, and it is expanded in the catechism. The acts are 
 predominantly those of worship as it is prescribed in the prayer- 
 book. Acts of churchmanship broaden out, of course, into 
 ecclesiastical enterprises like missions, and the part of the creed 
 that refers to the church expands into an interpretation of 
 ecclesiastical history. Here, then, are two currents that flow 
 side by side — training in a definite set of religious acts, and 
 instruction in a definite set of beliefs. Rather, here are two 
 phases of a single process for leading the pupil into greater and 
 greater participation in a religious fellowship. For doctrine 
 is presented specifically as church doctrine, not as a reasoned 
 philosophy, not even as exegesis of the Bible. 
 
 316 
 
RITUALISM 317 
 
 Let us call these two phases of churchmanshlp doctrine and 
 worship. Each is susceptible of variant interpretations that 
 lead to variations in educational practice. Thus, on the side 
 of doctrine there may be a close approach to the dogmatic type 
 of religious teaching, or there may be wide divergence from it. 
 Teaching of catechism that insists upon the literal truth of 
 traditional doctrines moves toward dogmatism; but when 
 doctrines are treated as symbols of the church fellowship, or as 
 mental pictures that assist in producing a devotional frame of 
 mind, the movement is away from the dogmatic type. All in 
 all, the ritualistic type tends to exalt the organic life or fellow- 
 ship of the church, and for this reason great latitude with re- 
 spect to theological thought becomes natural. Therefore the 
 educational tendency that we are now considering takes far 
 less concern for the orthodoxy of the pupil than for his religious 
 practices. 
 
 On the side of worship the variations range all the way from 
 the mass, an act wrought by the priest for the people, to the 
 cultivation of the evangelical type of conversion, in which the 
 individual realizes God without priestly intervention. The 
 church as teacher, accordingly, may take the attitude of an 
 authority that requires conformity because it is the official 
 agent of God upon earth, or that of a group of friends who would 
 share their treasures with children, or it may take an interme- 
 diate position like that of the family, a group with common in- 
 terests that are pursued in common, a group that educates pre- 
 cisely by the community of the younger and the older members. 
 
 Some educational advantages of the ritualistic point of 
 view. (1) The church and its services offer material of instruc- 
 tion that the pupil can experience as present and concrete. The 
 church building and its furniture, to begin with, meet the pupil 
 as a visible expression of religion. Here is the font at which he 
 was baptized, for example. It becomes, in due time, a means of 
 teaching him that he is a member of the church and a child of 
 God. Here is the sanctuary that contains the cup out of which 
 he will drink at his first communion; here is where the bishop 
 will sit when he comes to confirm you. So with a large number 
 
318 RITUALISM 
 
 of objects. In this way the church building and its furniture 
 can be used also for introducing some analysis of the parts of 
 the morning and the evening service. The prayer-book itself 
 then becomes another piece of concrete material, interesting, if 
 for no other reason, because it is associated with pew and kneel- 
 ing-stool and chancel, but interesting also because it now be- 
 comes a guide to things that are to be done by the child himself. 
 Next comes the use of the Christian festivals — the Christian 
 year — as concrete teaching material. The day schools have 
 only begun to realize the educational possibilities of our na- 
 tional festivals, but the Christian festivals have been effectively 
 used for centuries as a method of popular instruction in Scrip- 
 ture story and church doctrine. 
 
 (2) Small children are fond of action and of repetition. When 
 to the sensuous impressiveness of a churchly interior, music, 
 vestments, processional, and responsive actions of priest, choir, 
 and congregation, we add opportunity to take an active part in 
 the whole, important conditions of a child's interest are met. 
 This is true even if the part be nothing more than standing or 
 kneeling or saying " Amen" at the right point. Here are pray- 
 ers to be committed to memory because they are to be used. 
 One must learn to find the place in the prayer-book because it 
 too is to be used. Repetition also fits in with children's spon- 
 taneous ways. Children are sometimes said to be little ritual- 
 ists by nature. They want the favorite story told again and 
 again, and they prefer to have it unchanged.^ They enjoy 
 repeating nonsense rhymes. They invent and hand down from 
 one generation of children to another essentially ritualistic ways 
 of conducting parts of their plays, as "counting out»" They 
 devise secret symbols and artificial languages to be used among 
 themselves. They like to repeat the same evening prayer, 
 and to turn it into a singsong. The explanation of this fond- 
 ness for ritualism is to be found chiefly in the fact that the re- 
 currence of a familiar thing to which one has been able to make 
 
 1 1 was once telling to two children, aged respectively three and five, a story 
 that they had already heard, when I inadvertently changed the word "kind" 
 to "good." Instantly the younger child interposed "kind" with some 
 vehemence, and the five-year old seconded the amendment vociferously. 
 
RITUALISM 319 
 
 adjustment in the past produces a sense of being equal to the 
 occasion. In a small child's world there are so many things 
 that are uncontrollable and unpredictable, so many confusing 
 situations, that there is positive satisfaction when he can know 
 "just what comes next." To master a religious ritual, conse- 
 quently, brings satisfaction even regardless of the particular 
 significance of the content. 
 
 (3) Many adolescents welcome symbols for longings that they 
 are not as yet able to understand. When adolescence approaches, 
 one may react from that which is familiar and ordinary, desir- 
 ing something different and fresh. But now an entirely con- 
 trary tendency is likely to set in, a tendency which, though it is 
 the opposite of childhood's liking for the familiar, nevertheless 
 reinforces the influence of the ritual. For adolescence not 
 seldom brings idealistic longings that crave expression though 
 they cannot as yet define themselves. Symbols offer one mode 
 of expression, especially symbols that are stately and sounding, 
 but not too literal. What is ancient, somewhat apart from the 
 common day, to be used in common but not to be too familiarly 
 talked about — this offers, so to say, a large and dimly lighted 
 room in which the adolescent self can walk forth with other 
 souls without being too closely interrogated as to who or what 
 it is. 
 
 (4) The assumption that the pupil is already a member of an 
 important group that includes adults can be used as an incentive 
 to study and to social growth. Under ritualistic presuppositions 
 the pupil will not be treated as a mere individual, or merely as 
 one of the social class " children." Teaching will rarely if ever 
 consist exclusively in bringing together a child mind and a piece 
 of abstract information. Interfused with every process and with 
 every piece of material will be some relation that is to be ful- 
 filled between the pupil and the group to which he belongs. A 
 direct motive for fulfilling it will grow out of the fact that he 
 belongs to the same society as the most dignified adult. The 
 church is "our" church, the pastor is "my" pastor as much as 
 anybody's. The creed is what "we" believe much more than it 
 is what " I " believe. If this did nothing more for a child than 
 
320 RITUALISM 
 
 give him some little sense of his own dignity, or produce a little 
 genuine reverence, it would be worth while. But it can be 
 used by the teacher as an interesting approach to various parts 
 of the subject-matter. Just as the expectation of going on a 
 journey next week through a given part of the country makes 
 the geography of it all alive to a child, so the prospect of hav- 
 ing a new part with grown-ups in their enterprises makes the 
 enterprises themselves significant, even enables a child to feel 
 motives that might have had no other entrance into his feelings. 
 But more than this; the teacher can use the child's social con- 
 nection with adults in the church as specific material for the 
 teaching of social relations and for the development of partic- 
 ular social habits. Much of the peculiar power of the family 
 in social education might conceivably be achieved by a warm 
 and well organized church fellowship. 
 
 Some pitfalls of ritualistic education. We have seen that 
 ritualistic tendencies in education have two phases, teaching of 
 creed and catechism, and training in worship. In both direc- 
 tions dangers appear. 
 
 (1) When the meaning of the church fellowship is found in an 
 ancient symbol instead of in a common, forward-looking purpose, 
 there is danger that instruction will be cither dogmatic, or else 
 of the shallow, memoriter sort. Before me lies A Fundamental 
 Catechism,^ intended for children from six to twelve years of age, 
 which has precisely the marks, already stated in earlier chapters, 
 of the dogmatic type of teaching. Here is what purports to be 
 knowledge, but it is pseudo-knowledge as far as it enters at all 
 into the minds of children of six to twelve years. "How did 
 God make all things? Ans. God first thought about making 
 things, and then willed to make them, and then he made them. 
 . . . What do we call making things out of nothing? Ans. 
 Making things out of nothing we call creating." Again, there 
 is the dogmatic inability to accept the principle of gradation of 
 material, the same dogmatic formulae being offered for children 
 all the way from six years to twelve. Finally, there is the 
 characteristic dogmatic insistence upon particular words. "The 
 
 1 By H. H. Oberly. Published by Thomas Whittaker, New York, 1908. 
 
RITUALISM 321 
 
 teacher should see that the lessons are learned according to the 
 exact words." That is, instead of using words because one has 
 something to say, the child employs them in such a way as to 
 produce a verbal mental habit that prevents thinking. 
 
 One might go on to ask: What in general is understood by 
 "learning" the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, and 
 the Apostles' Creed in any of our churches ? What is the educa- 
 tional significance of finding a class of catechumens letter-per- 
 fect in them all? How much does it assure in the way of 
 an intelligent Christian purpose held in common? In short, 
 under dogmatic and ritualistic auspices alike the very form of 
 catechetical instruction and its intellectualistic presuppositions 
 prove to be inadequate for Christian education that has as its 
 dominating motive the inculcation of a foi*ward-looking, world- 
 transforming social purpose. Without doubt the incorporation 
 of the missionary interest into church education is enlarging the 
 mental horizon and stimulating the social will. But the rela- 
 tion between missions and the ancient creeds is rather tenuous 
 at the best, so that the tendency is to add giving to catechizing 
 rather than to regenerate the catechizing itself. Moreover, as 
 long as the exposition of the Christian faith retains the dogmatic 
 form, the missionary purpose itself will lack social breadth, 
 missions themselves being a measure for propagating the cate- 
 chism, and for getting men into churches as sectarian as ours 
 at the home base. 
 
 (2) Training a child in 'prescribed, indefinitely repeated acts 
 of worship as the main constituent of churchmanship provides for 
 the perpetuation of the church as a particular society in the com- 
 munity and the world, but not for the reconstruction of the com- 
 munity or of the world. In non-ritualistic circles the training of 
 children in precise forms of worship is looked upon with con- 
 siderable distrust. What is desired, it is said, is inner life, 
 not outward ceremony, however seemly. There is fear that 
 the ceremony, being punctiliously insisted upon, will be sub- 
 stituted for the states of heart and will that it is supposed to 
 express. Ritualistic education can easily reply that the chil- 
 dren under its care show at least as convincing signs of rever- 
 
322 RITUALISM 
 
 ence and of real appreciation of the content of church worship 
 as children otherwise trained. Moreover, psychology is likely 
 to be called as an expert witness to the truth that outward " ex- 
 pression of the emotions" may actually help to produce the 
 emotions themselves. Finally, it may be said that the com- 
 mon worship of every organized communion sooner or later 
 takes on definite, characteristic forms, to which children, as a 
 matter of fact, become habituated, so that the real issue is not 
 that of inner life versus outer form. We have to choose, rather, 
 between different sorts of inner life, and between different sorts 
 of outer form. 
 
 Neither the pro nor the con in this debate reaches quite to 
 the bottom of the problem of social education in and through 
 the churches. A ritual has direct social significance. For a 
 liturgy does not merely relate the worshipper to some particular 
 idea, or merely remind him of God. Even when it does these 
 things ineffectively it nevertheless relates the worshipper to 
 other worshippers, binding them all together in a common social 
 consciousness. It does this, not only or chiefly by bringing 
 them together within four walls, but by causing them to do and 
 to say many things in unison. There are fraternities, like the 
 Freemasons, that appear to maintain their existence chiefly 
 by the unifying power of a ritual. There is no room for doubt 
 that training in ritual worship is an effective method for produc- 
 ing in children a genuine group consciousness, each child being 
 carried beyond self-regard and self-will by each common act. 
 Of social training, as of learning arithmetic, it may be said that 
 we "learn by doing'* more than by listening. We learn "to- 
 getherness" by doing some particular thing together over and 
 over again. 
 
 The ritualistic type of religious education thus furnishes 
 a means for the perpetuation of the church as a particular so- 
 ciety within the community. A distinctive form of worship, 
 repeated every Sunday, produces in the worshipper a sense 
 of being himself religiously distinct from the mass outside 
 his church. This sense of distinctness easily passes into a posi- 
 tive sense of obligation, and into firm loyalty. It would be 
 
RITUALISM 323 
 
 difficult to discover an educational instrument that is better 
 adapted for producing a close-knit, self-perpetuating ecclesi- 
 astical consciousness. 
 
 But the point of its social strength is also the point where 
 danger of social limitation and defect appears. For the problem 
 of the Christian religion is that of transforming the community's 
 whole social life into a brotherhood. A particular religious 
 fraternity within the community, though its doors be wide open 
 to everybody, is not, and cannot be, the solution of this prob- 
 lem. The social education of the child must have a horizon 
 that reaches far outside of church consciousness. He must be 
 trained to community "togetherness" not merely ecclesiastical 
 "togetherness." Loyalty to the church must fuse in his con- 
 sciousness with loyalty of the church to the cause of social wel- 
 fare, social justice, and world society. 
 
 . This might conceivably be accomplished in part through a 
 ritual. But the content of it would have to be rich in social 
 suggestiveness. To be thus rich, it would have to approach the 
 problems of to-day and of to-morrow in terms that are not too 
 ancient. The simple truth is that we cannot adequately express 
 our own sense of the social will of God in terms derived from the 
 outworn social standards of centuries ago. How, for example, 
 can we bring ourselves to pray heartily for "the poor" in the 
 ancient terms? The existence of poverty suggests to us, or 
 ought to, a different line of reflection, a different sort of stimulus. 
 We need modes of worship that will make it uncomfortable for 
 us to carry " the poor" to the Lord when we the worshippers are 
 carrying the product of the laborer's industry in our own 
 pockets ! Nor will the offering of our worldly substance as a 
 part of the ritual suffice. Into worship itself must go the sword 
 of the Spirit, the sword of the social justice that is love. 
 
CHAPTER XXIII 
 EDUCATIONAL TENDENCIES OF EVANGELICALISM 
 
 Personal religion as experience of reconciliation with God. 
 
 The term "evangehcalism" will be used in this discussion in 
 the restricted sense of promoting personal religion conceived 
 as experience of one's reconciliation with God. Evangelicalism 
 takes the standpoint of personal experience as distinguished 
 from doctrinal correctness, from correct church relations, 
 from ritualistic performances, and from correct acts or "good 
 works." Reconciliation is thought of, not as our achievement,. 
 but as divinely wrought for us and within us, and requiring of 
 us only surrender of self-will and acceptance of the will of God. 
 The emphasis is upon an experienced reversal of one's status be- 
 fore God, and a corresponding reversal in one's course of life. 
 
 To produce contrast-effects like this the conditions of stirring 
 emotions must be created. The people have been gathered 
 into great assemblies where the arts of social suggestion have 
 been employed, often with skill. The dreadfulness of sin, the 
 hopeless outlook for the sinner, the sufferings of Jesus on our 
 behalf, the readiness of the Father to forgive, the happiness of 
 the pardoned sinner, and his release from the thraldom of evil 
 desires and habits — these are the most characteristic themes. 
 They have been reinforced by appealing music, personal testi- 
 mony of converts, individual urging, and the sight of others 
 yielding to these persuasives. So much has religious emotion 
 been focussed upon this one point that "having a personal 
 Christian experience" has been understood in large circles as 
 meaning "having a conversion experience." The remainder of 
 life has anchored itself in the assurance that at some particular 
 point in time "the great transaction" has been completed. 
 
 The impossibility of continuously maintaining the emotion^ 
 
 324 
 
EVANGELICALISM 325 
 
 exaltation of the revival, and tlie limited response to the revival 
 appeal, have necessitated much softening down of these con- 
 trast-effects in the every-day life of the churches. The typical 
 appeal now becomes to "decide for Christ," and highly colored 
 emotions are declared to be non-essential. Here we find a shift 
 of emphasis from God's acts in us and with respect to us, to our 
 acts with respect to him and his purposes. What here remains 
 as characteristic of evangelicalism is little more than the teach- 
 ing that to be a Christian one must at some particular instant 
 cross a line that separates the saved from the unsaved. 
 
 Some social consequences of this point of view. Looked at 
 as an abstract theory, the standpoint of such a personal religious 
 experience, as far as it is held out as a privilege of every one, and 
 not as an arbitrary divine bestowal, may be said to contain a 
 germ of religious democracy. As a matter of fact, insistence 
 that all men are sinners, that all are subject to the same con- 
 demnation, that all must meet the same conditions of salvation, 
 and that the attitude of God is "Whosoever will," has been an 
 appreciable social leveller. Revival meetings are notably demo- 
 cratic in tone. If wealth or privilege retains any aristocratic 
 prerogative in them, it must be by some subtle rather than overt 
 control. Moreover, the thought that each of us stands in direct, 
 indefinitely modifiable relations with God, not merely in some 
 fixed social status, has been an immeasurable inspiration to 
 self-development. It has brought out the innate powers of 
 multitudes of plain men. It has stimulated education. Long 
 before our States reached a conviction that the public school 
 system should reach all the way to the university, or even to the 
 high school, ministers were successfully appealing to farmers, 
 mechanics, and shopkeepers to found and support academies 
 and colleges and to send their sons thereto. 
 
 Theoretically evangelicalism transcends also certain other 
 tendencies to spiritual aristocracy that have long had a place 
 within Christianity. No longer are the favors of the divine 
 presence regarded as a prerogative of a few saints who can 
 give themselves to contemplation and to austerities while the 
 mass of the people walks upon the lower level of formal com- 
 
326 EVANGELICALISM 
 
 pllance with a few external requirements of the church. No; 
 the plain man, too, can walk in heavenly places in this life, 
 and he can converse out of his own experience upon the highest 
 themes. 
 
 All this is true theoretically, and to some extent in practice. 
 But the tendency toward democracy that is unquestionably 
 here is partly defeated by the effort of evangelicaHsm to pro- 
 mote a uniform experience among human beings who are not 
 uniform. Attempts to standardize religious emotion have 
 failed even in religious bodies in which these attempts have been 
 unresisted. But in the meantime, individuals who by virtue 
 of temperamental traits or of a favorable conjunction of cir- 
 cumstances happen to have had the standard evangelical ex- 
 perience, have become a spiritual aristocracy. They are the 
 ones who have indubitably "got religion"; they are the ones 
 who have something to talk about in the experience meeting; 
 and consequently a tacit discount is placed upon experience of 
 other types. Thus we have a superior religious class alongside 
 the religious commonalty, and between the two there often 
 exists an emotional difference that interferes with the formation 
 of unified group purposes. 
 
 The place of children in the thought of evangelicalism. 
 Not only are adults not all capable of the experience that evan- 
 gelicalism has prized; this experience is also practically inacces- 
 sible to young children without forcing them toward religious 
 morbidity. The conversion experience is distinctly a thing of 
 adolescent and adult life. Here, then, is another tendency to 
 religious stratification. If church membership is reserved for 
 those who have had the standard evangelical experience, then 
 what is the religious and ecclesiastical status of young children 
 who are under the church's care? Unmodified evangelicalism 
 has no workable conception of a present Christian life for them, 
 or of membership in the Christian communion. 
 
 A movement that exalts the love of God as evangelicalism 
 has done is bound, of course, to take a warm interest in children. 
 It is bound to find ways to teach religion, whether consistently 
 or not. In fact, the churches that have been foremost in the 
 
EVANGELICALISM 327 
 
 Sunday school movement are the ones that have been most 
 strongly impregnated with evangelicaHsm. They have looked 
 upon the Sunday school theoretically as an agency for convert- 
 ing the young. But they have stretched the term " conversion." 
 Their observation of children has shown the inapphcability of 
 the term in its strict evangelical sense to the younger pupils, 
 and to a large extent even to adolescents. The churches have 
 been forced by realities to conceive the Sunday school more 
 and more as an educational enterprise. The acclimating of the 
 term "religious education" during the last twenty years is an 
 interesting index of this movement. Religious thought with 
 respect to the young is crystallizing, even in evangelical circles, 
 around the idea of religious growth — growth that does not 
 necessarily presuppose an antecedent conversion. 
 
 Wherein, now, can such religious growth be conceived to con- 
 sist? Can it be included wdthin the notion of religious experi- 
 ence, and if so, how? The close association of evangelicalism 
 with dogmatism produced as a first conception of the pupil's 
 growth that of increase in his knowledge of the Scriptures. 
 But this did not satisfy the presupposition that religion is an 
 experience of God. Evangelicalism, with all its emphasis 
 upon the Bible, could not rest here. The child's knowledge, 
 even of the Scriptures, must not be left as a thing by itself; it 
 must somehow be wrought into an integral life that can move on 
 from level to level as the child's years increase. Again and again 
 effort has been made to meet this demand by adding evangelism 
 to religious education. But this has not met the situation be- 
 cause it ignores the principle of growth. Child evangelism is 
 itself something per se interjected into the course of teaching 
 and training, and entirely independent of the principle of 
 growth. 
 
 Gradually there is dawning a realization that our social ex- 
 perience is a sphere for communion with God, that here children 
 can share religion with adults, and can grow in religion without 
 any forcing whatever. Here the bond of union between adults, 
 and between them and children, is the same; it is neither uni- 
 formity of doctrine, nor yet the emotional experience of recon- 
 
328 EVANGELICALISM 
 
 ciliation, but rather the experience of a purpose of reconciliation, 
 the purpose to hve a common life as brothers, and in so doing to 
 live a common life with the Father. 
 
 This is not only an inclusive conception, inclusive of indi- 
 viduals old and young, inclusive of all churches as far as they 
 are really brotherhoods, inclusive of all the good will beyond the 
 churches; it is also a theologically reconciling conception. The 
 notion of sin and of release from it, the notion of individual 
 reconciliation with the Father, and the notion of a life that is 
 from above, are not only not smothered; they are filled with the 
 most poignant content. The waste of life because we are not 
 brothers, the waste of health, the poverty, the broken homes, 
 the stunted and distorted minds, the quarrels, the oppression 
 of class by class, the riots, the wars, the pessimism — all this in 
 the midst of which we live, a part of which we are, is the world 
 sunken in iniquity. When in such a world we take as our 
 own God's purpose of reconciliation we do not escape the ex- 
 perience of condemnation and of repentance, or the necessity 
 for a saving faith. For we have natural tendencies to selfish- 
 ness, greed, and revenge, all of which must be overcome; we 
 have to extricate our will from a social complex in which we 
 profit at the expense of our fellows; we have to face the suffering 
 of the world as a consequence in part of our own neglect; we 
 find necessary not only stern self -discipline, but also faith that is 
 robust enough to face unflinchingly this, the most stupendous, 
 the most oppressive, the most tragic problem that the mind of 
 man has conceived. 
 
 This social experience of God in his world — God in all love, 
 and in all that wins us to the love way — makes the love of the 
 Father and the love of the neighbor one experience. This is a 
 religion of the heart. It will tax all the emotional resources of 
 evangelicalism. It will still single out each individual, and it 
 will go on utilizing the values of mass suggestion. But it will 
 not separate emotion from study or from action. And because 
 it will maintain these three in vital unity, it will obliterate the 
 gulf that has existed between child and man, between religious 
 education and religious experience. 
 
EVANGELICALISM 329 
 
 The Sunday school as an evangelistic agency. \Miat has 
 just been sketched might be called a socialized evangelicalism. 
 It conceives religion as experience, and specifically as experi- 
 ence of reconciliation, but it holds that reconciliation lies in the 
 purpose to reconcile, and that three parties are involved, my- 
 self, my neighbor, and God. It holds, further, that the inner 
 rectification of the heart, and the outer act of establishing a just 
 society, are phases of one and the same reconciling process. 
 Religious experience is here no longer separated from the social 
 relations and enterprises that a child can appreciate. On this 
 basis the Sunday school can still be — it must be — an evangel- 
 istic agency. But its effectiveness as such an agency will de- 
 pend to some extent upon reconstructing existing conditions 
 and methods. 
 
 (1) Unambiguous standing within the religious communion 
 should be made possible for every child. This cannot be done 
 until child religion is conceived in terms of a growing purpose. 
 A recent writer in a magazine that is published in the interest 
 of the religious life of boys treats the Christian experience as 
 if it must have its beginning in the bluntness of a conscious 
 life choice. He speaks of a day when we choose to take religion 
 in earnest, of an hour when the gospel must be deliberately 
 accepted or deliberately rejected. "The choice of life," he 
 says, "cannot be broken up into little bits."^ Here we have 
 a mechanical rather than a vital mode of thought concerning 
 the things of character. The successive acts in which a will 
 grows are thought of, not in terms of growth but of accretion, 
 or as so many mutually external bits which are merely juxta- 
 posed or heaped up. The same type of thought appears in 
 those who hold that every child must be on one side or the 
 other of a fixed line that separates the saved from the unsaved. 
 Parents whose affection makes it impossible for them to set 
 up any such mechanical division between their own offspring, 
 especially between young children, often fail to see the in- 
 congruity of ascribing anything of the kind to God. 
 
 A social conception of God and of our reconciliation with him 
 
 1 "Conversion," by H. R. Mackintosh. American Youth, August, 1913. 
 
330 EVANGELICALISM 
 
 will recognize every affectionate pulse-beat as divine. Re- 
 ligious education will seize upon every impulse to generosity, 
 to justice, and to co-operation as an occasion to make the pupil 
 realize that just here he is in fellowship with the church and 
 with the Father. This fellowship will involve mutual recogni- 
 tion, the child recognizing the church as a society in which he 
 must grow, and the church recognizing children as already 
 within itself, yes, as its very self in process of growth. This 
 recognition, to be most effective, will need outward signs and 
 specific methods of calling to remembrance. Just what 
 changes this will imply in the rules of various denominations 
 need not here be specified, nor is it necessary to suggest par- 
 ticular occasions on which adults and children may well cele- 
 brate together their unity in the Christian purpose. It is 
 enough to point out that overt acts of co-operation, and overt 
 recognition of one another, are essential alike to the child and 
 to the adult. 
 
 (2) The undue extension, and consequent weakening, of the 
 term "conversion," should be resisted. When the religious 
 life of small children is thought of in terms of status rather 
 than in terms of growth, the tendency is to extend and dilute 
 the meaning of the conversion whereby the status is supposed to 
 be established. If the term is to be applied to persons whose 
 will is still relatively inchoate, lacking sharp edges and definite 
 moral attitudes, what shall it mean when adults are called upon 
 to repent and be converted? Obviously, if adults and young 
 children are both included under the term, its essential and 
 irreducible meaning will be found in the infantile mind that 
 shows signs of piety. Have we not here a large part of the 
 explanation for the indefiniteness that has come to characterize 
 the evangelistic appeal to adults? And of the degradation of 
 statistics of conversions — as though one who holds up a hand, 
 or signs a card, or shakes hands with an evangelist is to be 
 counted as a converted man ! In the interest of child religion 
 and of adult religion alike, this tendency should be resisted. 
 Small children are simply not capable of viewing life's problems 
 in the perspective that is implied in an intelligent life choice. 
 
EVANGELICALISM 331 
 
 But they are capable of responding to love, and of sharing with 
 adults in the work of reconciliation — they are capable of grow- 
 ing in the love way. 
 
 (3) If a ''decision daif is observed, it should respect the prin- 
 ciple of growth, with its corollary of gradation. The rcductio 
 ad ahsurdum of Sunday school evangelism is found in Sunday 
 schools that once a year interrupt aind lay aside the educational 
 process in order to make an appeal to all pupils above seven 
 years of age to make an immediate decision for Christ. There 
 are schools in which the same little children sign decision cards 
 year after year. The trouble with this is not that there is too 
 much evangelism, but too little. For the meaning of the supn 
 posed decision is washed out and faded by the indiscriminate- 
 ness of the method. It should require no great depth of cither 
 psychological or religious insight to perceive that when the 
 same appeal for decision is put before a child of eight and one 
 of sixteen before whom the vista of life is opening emotionally 
 and intellectually, there is religious incongruity that is likely 
 to interfere with the vital processes of both. The will grows; 
 it, as well as the intelligence, requires gradation of educational 
 process and material. 
 
 Moreover, to ignore on decision day the growth of will that 
 has been going on through the regular processes of instruction 
 and training is to run the risk of making personal religion 
 abstract or sentimental or bafflingly mysterious. \Miy ask a 
 child to begin the religious life when he has already taken many 
 steps in it ? How can teachers assume that Christian purpose 
 is lacking when the whole tendency of the preceding Sunday 
 school experience has been to produce and clarify such purpose ? 
 The most that decision day can be expected to do is to produce 
 more or less of a climax in a process that has been going on for 
 years. This climax, too, will differ from department to de- 
 partment. If decision day could be changed in substance and 
 in name to "fellowship day," the purpose of which should be 
 realization of our fellowship with one another, with Jesus, and 
 with the Father in a common purpose of social reconciliation, 
 then every grade in the school could celebrate the festival in 
 
332 EVANGELICALISM 
 
 its own way. The social longings of adolescence could be met 
 by confirmation or its equivalent in the way of public con- 
 fession by the pupil and recognition by the church. A parallel, 
 but simpler and narrower, declaration of standpoint could be 
 made by each earlier department or grade, and recognition by 
 the church through the department could correspond to the 
 recognition of adolescents as full members. The whole would 
 constitute a joyous-solemn calling to mind of what it is that 
 unites these pupils and their teachers to one another in the 
 church and in the school, with appropriate measures for ena- 
 bling each pupil, in a manner appropriate to his age, to realize 
 that this is my purpose, and that this is my church. 
 
 There is reason for questioning the social tendency of de- 
 cision-day methods that cause pupils to exaggerate the dif- 
 ferences that exist between them. There are schools in which 
 certain pupils, whose expressions of religious interest have 
 been more prompt or more free than those of other pupils, 
 have been put forward until they have become "forward.'^ 
 The worst of it is not that these few children become priggish, 
 but that religion is misrepresented to the mass of the pupils. 
 It is misrepresented because their own religiousness goes 
 relatively unrecognized, and because religion itself here be- 
 comes sponsor for a kind of aristocracy. 
 
 The sum of the matter is that every day should be a day of 
 decision for every pupil according to his capacity for decision. 
 That is, the whole of religious education should have its roots 
 in social acts, relations, and purposes that grow from more to 
 more continuously. Not that the socializing of the will can 
 be expected to proceed with even pace through all stages 
 of growth. The curve of mental as well as of physical growth 
 is irregular, and so is the curve of social interest. We are to 
 expect rapid increase here, slower increase there, with only 
 approximate conformity of the individual to any age scale. 
 The general growth of social interest that comes with adoles- 
 cence may well be taken advantage of to secure the crystalliza- 
 tion of social purpose that has long been forming, that is, to 
 cause the pupil to realize, as never before, the fellowship of 
 
EVANGELICALISM 333 
 
 purpose that constitutes the church. But the realization 
 of this fellowship should be part and parcel of the whole scheme 
 of religious instruction and training in all the grades. 
 
 (4) Whatever is vital in the "evangelistic department" of 
 Sunday school organizations shoidd be taken up into the regidar 
 plan of instruction and training, and ''child evangelism" shoidd 
 cease. The reason for an evangelistic department, a child 
 evangelist, and evangelistic mass meetings for children grows 
 out of the presupposition that the Sunday school, in its regular 
 and systematic work, will teach Bible or catechism rather than 
 develop Christian purpose in children. Let us make the pre- 
 supposition untrue! When we do so, we shall realize that 
 evangelistic meetings for children, especially those conducted 
 by strangers who use high-pressure methods that ignore the 
 laws of growth, are not only unnecessary, but also injurious. 
 They are injurious because the impression that they make upon 
 children as to the nature of the Christian life is untrue. It is 
 as untrue as would be the presentation to healthy children of a 
 bottle of medicine to make them grow. The Christian life 
 cannot be truthfully separated, with either child or adult, from 
 the social issues that constitute the difference between the mind 
 of Christ and the love of the world. To draw the child's mind 
 away from these issues as they appear before him in his own 
 inch-by-inch experience, and as the faithful Sunday school 
 teacher has to recognize them, into a relatively abstract or 
 sentimental contemplation of himself or of Christ, is to counter- 
 act, not to supplement the sound work of religious education. 
 
 (5) Greater emphasis should be i^laced upon the content of the 
 Christian purpose. In morals and religion alike we are under 
 the influence of traditions that unduly exalt the form of life as 
 against the content. We are not seldom urged to be con- 
 scientious, or to be true to duty when if we followed the advice 
 we should obey an ignorant and sometimes injurious sense of 
 duty. We are advised to surrender to God before there has 
 been adequate inquiry into our idea of God. The value of sur- 
 render to God depends upon the character of the God to whom 
 we surrender. We are invited to come to Christ when it is not 
 
334 EVANGELICALISM 
 
 decisively clear what this means in terms of actual social living. 
 The nature of God and the mind of Christ must be expressed in 
 these terms in all our teaching. The divine presence and the 
 divine nature are to be discerned in the love between men that 
 the pupil can actually witness and take part in. Here is the 
 application within religious education of evangelicalism's in- 
 sistence that religion is an experience. Children can have the 
 experience because they can appreciate love and form a per- 
 sonal will to love. But this will to love must learn to discrim- 
 inate. It must be trained to take notice of the conditions of 
 human life; it must learn what are the causes of welfare and 
 of illfare; it must define social issues as they arise, but always 
 with eyes for the distant as well as the immediate good. This 
 is evangelistic teaching, the teaching of the good news that is 
 for all the world, the pressing home to the individual pupil of 
 the insistent love of God. 
 
CHAPTER XXIV 
 EDUCATIONAL TENDENCIES OF LIBERALISM 
 
 The notion of religious freedom. For the purposes of the 
 present discussion rehgious liberaHsm may be defined as the 
 attempt to incorporate freedom into rehgion. Not freedom 
 from religion, but freedom in religion, is the idea. As rehgious 
 repression has taken the two main forms of control of thought 
 and control of worship or of ecclesiastical Hfe in general, so tlie 
 effort at liberation has been directed chiefly toward untram- 
 melled thinking and a rationally regulated life, worship included. 
 
 The demand for religious subjection has always presented 
 itself as a command of God addressed to men, whereas it has 
 always been a command of some men addressed to others in the 
 name of God. The essence of dogmatism is its demand that I 
 shall take as divine revelation what other men have already 
 judged to be revelation. To submit to this demand is to sub- 
 mit to men, not God. Just so, when the church prescribes 
 exclusive modes of worship or rules of conduct, what happens 
 is that some men presume to decide these things for others. 
 Hence the central tendency of liberalism has been to clear up 
 the confusion of mind whereby human opinions have been given 
 the force of divine revelation, and human judgments the force 
 of divine commands, and to show, instead, the inherent natural- 
 ness and reasonableness of religion. This clearing-up process 
 is going on actively in many ecclesiastical circles, orthodox as 
 well as heterodox. 
 
 The result of resisting sectarian restrictions upon the mind, 
 and of falling back upon what is broadly human as the sphere 
 in which to trace the thoughts of God, varies according to the 
 position of the emphasis. When liberalism places its emphasis 
 upon sound knowledge, how to maintain religious zeal becomes 
 a problem. The very narrowness of dogmatism seems at times 
 
 335 
 
336 LIBERALISM 
 
 to produce religious intensity that has power with men, whereas 
 the Hberal thinker tends not seldom to become an onlooker 
 rather than a doer. On the other hand, however, breadth of 
 thought tends with some persons toward a more or less mystical 
 realization of the all-encompassing divine life. Here is warmth 
 of feeling, not mere pointedness of thought. But, all in all, 
 the attempt to incorporate freedom into religion tends to re- 
 place the rejected authority not so much by sound knowledge, 
 or by mystical delights, as by. the .affirmation of ethical princi- 
 ples as the mind of God. When liberalism insists upon being 
 positively religious as well as open-minded, it has nothing that 
 it can substitute for simple goodness. Dogmatism encounters 
 the danger of substituting orthodoxy for kindness, and ritualism 
 the danger of substituting institutional conformity for social 
 breadth. But liberalism has no cloak with which to conceal 
 the irreligion that is in all unkindness, all neglect of human needs. 
 
 Liberalism instills ethical principles, not by authority, but 
 through reflection. Hence the tendency to habituation by drill 
 processes is less in evidence than it is in either the dogmatic 
 or the ritualistic type of education. Moreover, since reflection 
 is a process in which one acts as an individual, a process in which 
 one must resist gregarious tendencies, for the time being at least, 
 liberalism is less inclined than is evangelicalism to mass move- 
 ments that sway men by suggestion rather than 1^ inciting them 
 to think for themselves. 
 
 Here, then, are three points in which liberalism has obvious 
 significance for a theory of religious education: The effort to 
 develop in each person an individual or independent attitude 
 in all religious matters; the awakening of thought as contrasted 
 with mental habituation; and the fusion of rightness toward 
 God with rightness toward men. Before we attempt to weigh 
 the social significance of all this, let us pause to consider some 
 phases of the relation between religious freedom and the general 
 cause of human liberty. 
 
 Can there be religious emancipation within aristocratic 
 or plutocratic society? * It is possible to think of liberal relig- 
 ion in terms of the individual rather than of society. If the 
 
LIBERALISM 337 
 
 civil state protects me from distraint of person and of property 
 on account of religion, and if I use my own ability to think, re- 
 sisting all ecclesiastical dictation, am I not then free indeed? 
 What is religious emancipation if not just release from ancient 
 ecclesiastical restraints ? 
 
 The youth of our colleges are often warned not to think 
 of freedom as merely negative, the mere absence of restraint. 
 We say to them: "You cannot be really free until, firsts you 
 acquire ability to resist your impulses and to organize yourself 
 upon a plan that you deliberately approve, and until, second, 
 you acquire purposes large enough to furnish outlet for your 
 powers." With equal truth a ^Azr(^ thing might be said : "You 
 cannot be free until you are enlisted in the cause of freedom for 
 all. For the you that requires to be organized, and that requires 
 outlet for its powers, is social in nature, fundamentally so. 
 Moreover, as long as you remain an acquiescent, non-protesting 
 member of a society that oppresses your fellows, you must either 
 close your eyes to injustice or else bribe your heart by the ad- 
 vantages of silence. In either case the wheel of inequality 
 passes over your soul, grinding it into the dust. Oppression 
 makes its beneficiaries as well as its victims unfree." 
 
 It is quite possible to exercise negative religious freedom with- 
 out finding adequate religious self-expression. The negatively 
 free mind may be most conventional, most swayed by the in- 
 terests with which it is socially and economically bound. It 
 may be a contented member of a religious set or clique. It may 
 be so tied to the past as to resist the truly free religion of social 
 justice. As a matter of fact, the era of our attempt to unfetter 
 religion finds various fundamental rights of man as yet un- 
 achieved, and as yet there is no sufficiently clear demonstration 
 of the essential relationship between the different kinds of free- 
 dom. In a society that does not yet secure to masses of children 
 the health that the community possesses the means to bestow — 
 in such a society what is religious freedom after all, even for 
 one whose own children are healthy ? 
 
 The right to think, and to worship according to the dictates 
 of one's own judgment does indeed occupy a basal position 
 
338 LIBERALISM 
 
 in the general emancipation of man. But the structure of 
 liberty consists of much more than foundation-stones. Release 
 from restraint is release of power that insists upon giving effect 
 to itself. In this case, what effect? To throw off the yoke 
 of spiritual subjection must ultimately mean getting into 
 action for larger, deeper spiritual ends. It must mean that 
 we are ready to wrestle as never before with the god of this 
 world. 
 
 In short, within a social system of aristocratic or plutocratic 
 privilege, positive religious emancipation is possible only on 
 condition that we enter into the divine purpose to do away with 
 privilege and set up democracy. Religious liberalism has not 
 failed to give signs that this is the law of its inner life, for it 
 has been foremost in opposition to slavery. In general, too, 
 the liberal mind can be relied upon to see through the obfusca- 
 tions whereby autocracy of many kinds constantly strives to 
 justify irrational force by reason. Going forward in the same 
 path, emancipated souls will find still fuller religious life, still 
 fuller realization of God, in the struggle for social justice and a 
 world society. Emancipated souls must find this, or else, their 
 freedom being merely negative, their religious life will be bound 
 hand and foot by social orthodoxy. 
 
 The educational problems of liberalism. All the queries 
 that have just been raised as to the relations within liberalism 
 between reflection and action on the one hand, and between 
 individual independence and social justice on the other, are 
 educational problems. I shall now set them forth as such, 
 with a hint or two toward solutions. 
 
 (1) Liberalism opens the way to the most vital materials and 
 methods of instruction, but it encounters the danger of intellectual' 
 ism. It is of the essence of external religious authority to dis- 
 courage too curious prying into facts with respect to the human 
 bearers of the supposed divine prerogatives. History is rel- 
 atively non-essential, at least history as inquiry, for dogmatism 
 is fully ready to formulate all that is religiously essential in the 
 past. Similarly, dogmatism is satisfied with a relatively narrow 
 range of subjects for study. Why, for instance, should one 
 
LIBERALISM 339 
 
 study religions other than one's own? Why should one be 
 religiously concerned to understand the world movements of 
 the present, since a completed faith was once delivered, and only 
 once, to the saints ? This intellectual attitude liberalism exactly 
 reverses. It is interested in the human as such, partly for the 
 sake of avoiding human error, partly because the human as 
 such is looked upon as revealing divine guidance and meaning. 
 Therefore, the further we can trace down the human elements in 
 history the better; the more we know about other religions the 
 better for our own. 
 
 This spirit meets the interests of pupils without reservation, 
 for it brings human action into the foreground, and encourages 
 curiosity. There is less tendency to flatten out things in the 
 interest of a formula. Moreover, methods of pupil self-expres- 
 sion can be adopted with less reserve. For, whereas dogmatic 
 teaching fails of its purpose unless it gives the pupil's mind a 
 particular set, liberalism is most concerned that the pupil 
 should weigh facts, and do some real thinking of his own, even 
 if his thoughts do not reproduce those of his teacher. 
 
 On the other hand, so much of the struggle for religious free- 
 dom has centred around the right to think, and the adoption of 
 sound methods of investigation has necessitated so much revi- 
 sion of biblical interpretation, that liberalism has formed an 
 intellectual habit that, carried into religious life, becomes in- 
 tellectualism. The place that intellectuality occupies in the 
 campaign against restraints and against historical errors is 
 different from the place that it holds in the promotion of vital 
 religion. The mental operation that is chiefly required for 
 religious growth is the discriminative appreciation of values. 
 This involves, of course, observation of facts, some understand- 
 ing of the past, and some rational foresight; it involves some 
 generalization of the standpoint from which one judges life and 
 duty; but here the main work of intelligence is to clarify one's 
 desires and purposes so that revision may be made, and to 
 discover means whereby one's life purposes may be carried 
 out. The achievement of a broad outlook, then, or of ability 
 to prove or defend one's position by sound knowledge is at 
 
340 LIBERALISM 
 
 most a single part, and that not the central part, of religious 
 instruction.^ 
 
 (2) Liberalism makes for ethical clarity and breadth, but it 
 easily fails of ethical fervor. Holding to the ideal of a rationally 
 ordered life, as distinguished from one that is ecclesiastically 
 prescribed, the liberal would avoid, on the one hand, drifting 
 with the currents of conventionalism and, on the other hand, 
 being swept off his feet by floods of mass emotion. The atti- 
 tude of ethical reflection has the value of contributing to 
 clarity and breadth of purpose, and not seldom to steady loyalty 
 to a principle through thick and thin. But, on the other hand, 
 reflection has the effect of inhibiting impulses, and of postponing 
 or resisting rather than of initiating action. Now, a locomotive 
 engine must of course have a throttle, but it must have steam 
 also. Human impulses must be regulated and redirected, but 
 yet the inner fire is what moves life up the grade of progress. 
 Religious education must include provision for cultivating re- 
 ligious fervor. 
 
 J Some years ago a liberal-minded clergyman of orthodox aflaiiations, con- 
 vinced that catechetical instruction should be revived in Protestantism, and 
 finding no printed catechism that sviited him, undertook to write one. Here are 
 some of the questions and answers that resulted : 
 
 "1. Q. Apart from the things which you believe, hope, or imagine to be true, 
 what do you know ? 
 
 A. I know that there is a world, and that I live in it. 
 
 2. Q. How do you know that there is a world ? 
 
 A. I know that there is a world because I can touch, taste, smell, see and 
 hear. 
 
 3. Q. How do you know that you live ? 
 
 A. I know that I live because I think, feel and will. 
 
 23. Q. Since God made you to love these things, does he compel you so to do ? 
 A. No; though God has made me in order that I might love the good, the 
 
 true, and the beautiful, He made me able to love or to hate, to choose or to 
 refuse, that so my love may be my own free offering to Him. This liberty 
 is God's highest gift to me, and I must take heed that I do not prove unworthy 
 of His trust. 
 
 24. Q. How may we know God ? 
 
 A. We may know God through our own moral character, our conscience, 
 and our best aspirations and hopes ; through nature and the beauty of the world 
 which he has made; through the better impulses of all men, and the enlight- 
 ened imderstanding and holy living of the best men; through the Bible; and 
 through the life and teachings of Jesus Christ." 
 
 This was intended for pupils from ten to fifteen years of age. The obvious 
 assumption is that what the clergyman regards as fundamental in his own 
 thought-system is fimdamental in religious instruction and therefore should 
 come first. 
 
LIBERALISM 341 
 
 (3) Liberalism cultivates respect for man as man, hut it does 
 not so readily appreciate institutional organizations of the good 
 u%ll, such as the church. It is not to be wondered at tliat those 
 whose liberties were wrested from the church by hard struggle 
 should show little inclination toward ecclesiastical harness. 
 But respect for man must go on to become love for man, and 
 love must go on from being a sentiment to become a policy of 
 action, and love as a policy of action requires machinery for 
 co-operation and for continuity. Liberalism should go on to 
 free men's hands and feet as well as heads — free them not only 
 in the sense of getting them loose, but also in the sense of getting 
 them into exercise. It would seem as though the next step 
 is to transform ecclesiastical institutions into organs of a free- 
 dom that is more complete than free speech, even the freedom 
 of love in co-operative action.^ 
 
 (4) These three positive educational tendencies of liberalism 
 can be reinforced, and the correlative defects avoided, by identify- 
 ing religious freedom with the positive purpose of the democracy of 
 God. When religious instruction has as its definite goal the 
 formation of an intelligent and thoroughly Christian social wjll, 
 the menace of intellectualism will be removed. It will be 
 removed, not by letting down intellectual standards, not by 
 putting fences around inquiry, but by putting knowledge into 
 its natural and proper relation to life. It is, I believe, the uni- 
 form experience of teachers and of educational institutions that, 
 all in all, students show the greatest intellectual zeal when they 
 are conscious that the knowledge that they seek has a bearing 
 upon their wider purposes. 
 
 Ethical clarity and breadth, moreover, can best be promoted 
 
 1 The ecclesiastical limitations of negative freedom are clearly apparent In 
 the following words of ex-President Eliot: "The genuine Unitarian values 
 so highly his liberty of thought and his freedom from all bonds of traditional 
 and gregarious opinion that, as a rule, he is not willing to attempt the imposi- 
 tion of his own opinions on anybody else, not even on his cliildren. He is 
 rarely interested in foreign missions except on their medical and anthropologi- 
 cal side, and he makes a poor propagandist at home; for he is apt to hold that 
 nobody ought to be or become a Unitarian except a person whose own mind 
 and will work in such a way that he cannot help being or becoming a Unitarian." 
 (From a pamphlet, The Education of our Boys and Girls, published by the Amer- 
 ican Unitarian Association.) 
 
342 LIBERALISM 
 
 
 in the presence of live social issues. There is, to be sure, a more 
 or less popular notion that in order to see a moral issue clearly 
 one must be outside it, must be able to look at it without feel- 
 ing it. But this is at most only a half-truth. There are mat- 
 ters, such as music and poetry, in which we do not even begin 
 to understand until our feelings are engaged. So, in moral 
 instruction nothing so effectively shakes pupil and teacher 
 out of moral conventionality as to face the actual, present strug- 
 gle of men for justice, and especially to take some part in it. 
 " I never thought of this before" is the common experience when 
 moral reflection steps out from the social aloofness of generalities 
 into the concreteness of a moral world now in process of crea- 
 tion. When we get into the struggle to putjove mto_effectiye 
 action, when we insist upon getting results, then two things hap- 
 pen: We love with a new fervor, and we see the nature of the 
 issue as we never saw it before. 
 
 It is then that the necessity and the possibilities of the 
 church fully dawn upon us. The church is necessary as a 
 preacher of radical good will, which is human participation in 
 a divine love that, though it may be repulsed, will not be 
 defeated. The church is necessary as a feJJojSKship of those 
 who, aspiring to this radical good will in their own conduct, 
 need the support of like aspiring souls. The church is necessary 
 as axhampion of the " forlorn hopes" of society, the social causes 
 that the "practical" man regards as visionary. The church is 
 necessary, finally, as an educator of children in these ideals 
 and practices. It is the only institution of large scope that we 
 can have any hope of inducing to teach democracy in this thor- 
 oughgoing fashion. Liberalism needs the church for the 
 achievement of liberty itself. 
 
CLASSIFIED BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 THE NEW SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS MANIFESTING ITSELF IN GENERAL 
 THEORIES OF EDUCATION 
 
 Bagley, W. C. The Educative Process. New York, 1910. Part I, 
 
 "Functions of Education." 
 Cubberley, E. P. Changing Conceptions of Education. Boston, 1909. 
 Dewey, J. Democracy arid Education. New York, 1916. 
 Dewey, J. and E. Schools of To-morrow. New York, 1915. 
 Earhart, L. B. Types of Teaching. Boston, 1915. Chapter XI, 
 
 "Socializing Exercises." 
 Graves, F. P. A Student's History of Education. New York, 1915. 
 
 Chapter XXVII, "Present Day Tendencies in Education." 
 King, Irving. Education for Social Efficiency. New York, 1913. 
 
 , Social Aspects of Education. New York, 1912. 
 
 MacVannel, J. A. Outline of a Course in the Philosophy of Education. 
 
 New York, 1912. 
 McMurry, F. M. Elementary School Standards. Yonkers-on-Hudson, 
 
 1913. 
 Monroe, P. A Text-Book in the History of Education. New York, 
 
 1915. The last four chapters analyze the educational inheritance 
 
 of the present generation. 
 O'Shea, M. V. Education as Adjustment. New York, 1905. Chapter 
 
 VII, "Adjustment as Affected by Social Organization." 
 
 , Social Development and Education. Boston, 1909. 
 
 Perry, C. A. Wider Use of the School Plant. New York, 1911. 
 Scott, C. A. Social Education. Boston, 1908. 
 
 Smith, W. R. An Introduction to Educational Sociology. Boston, 1917. 
 Snedden, D. Problems of Educational Readjustment. Boston, 1913. 
 
 B 
 
 THE SOCIAL INTERPRETATION AND APPLICATION OF THE CHRISTIAN 
 
 MESSAGE 
 
 The indispensable source for those who desire to keep abreast of 
 both thought and action in this field is Ward, H. F., A Year Book of the 
 
 343 
 
344 CLASSIFIED BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Church and Social Service in the United States. New York, 1916. New 
 editions are to be expected from time to time. This little book sketches 
 the history of the social service movement in the churches; describes 
 the organization and gives a directory of the social service departments 
 of the various denominations and of the Federal Council of Churches; 
 describes methods and programs of work; quotes the official utter- 
 ances of the denominations; gives a directory and description of extra- 
 ecclesiastical agencies for social service, and contains what is probably 
 the largest, most thoroughly classified and annotated bibliography of 
 the subject, including a large variety of pamphlet material. 
 
 1. The General Conception of the Christian Message and of the Christian 
 
 Experience 
 
 Note. — ^The intention here is merely to reveal a type of thinking. 
 The list is not representative in any other sense. For a fuller list, see 
 Ward's Year Book. 
 
 Brown, W. A. Is Christianity Practicable? New York, 1916. 
 
 Coe, G. A. "Contemporary Ideals in Religion." Religious Education, 
 XI (1916), 377-387. 
 
 Fremantle, W. H. The World as the Subject of Redemption. New 
 York, 1892. 
 
 Henderson, C. R. "Christianity and Social Problems." Chapter XI 
 of A Guide to the Study of the Christian Religion^ G. B. Smith, edi- 
 tor. Chicago, 1916. 
 
 King, H. C. Theology and the Social Consciousness. New York, 1902. 
 
 , The Moral and Religious Challenge of Our Times. New York, 1911. 
 
 Macfarland, C. S. Spiritual Cidture and Social Service. New York, 
 1912. 
 
 Mathews, S. The Individual and the Social Gospel. New York, 1914. 
 
 , "Theology and the Social Mind." Biblical World, XLVI (1915), 
 
 201-248. 
 
 Rauschenbusch, W. Christianity and the Social Crisis. New York, 1907. 
 
 Strong, J. My Religion in Everyday Life. New York, 1910. 
 
 , The Next Great Awakening. New York, 1913. 
 
 Ward, H. F. Social Evangelism. New York, 1915. 
 
 2. The Christian Approach to Particular Social Conditions and Problems 
 
 Note. — ^This list also is intended to be merely typical. It is sufficient 
 to indicate the change that has begun to take place in the practice of 
 
CLASSIFIED BIBLIOGRAPHY 345 
 
 the Christian life, but for an adequate list of particular activities and 
 programs and books, see Ward's Year Book. 
 
 Atkinson, H. A. The Church and the People's Play. Boston, 1915. 
 
 Balch, W. M. Christianity and the Labor Movement. Boston, 1912. 
 
 Coleman, G. W. Democracy in the Making. Boston, 1915. 
 
 Douglass, H. P. The New Home Missions. New York, 1914. 
 
 Earp, E. L. The Rural Church Movement. New York, 1914. 
 
 Elwood, C. A. Sociology and Modern Social Problems. New York, 
 1913. 
 
 Faunce, W. H. P. Social Aspects of Foreign Missions. New York, 
 1914. 
 
 Forbes, E. S., editor. Social Ideals of a Free Church. Boston, 1913. 
 
 Gladden, W. Applied Christianity. Boston, 1891. 
 
 , Christianity and Socialism. New York, 1905. 
 
 Gulick, S. The Fight for Peace. New York, 1915. 
 
 Hoben, A. "American Democracy and the Modern Church." Amer- 
 ican Journal of Sociology, January, 1917. 
 
 Jefferson, C. E. Christianity and Intenmtiorml Peace. New York, 
 1915. 
 
 Lynch, F. The Peace Problem. New York, 1911. 
 
 , Challenge: The Church and the New World Order. New York, 
 
 1917. 
 
 Macfarland, C. S. Christian Unity at Work. New York, 1913. 
 
 Men and Religion Movement, Messages of. 7 vols. New York, 1912. 
 
 Nearing, S. Social Religion. New York, 1913. 
 
 Rauschenbusch, W. Christianizing tlie Social Order. New York, 1912. 
 
 Smith, S. G. Democracy and the Church. New York, 1912. 
 
 Strayer, P. M. Reconstruction of the Church. New York, 1915. 
 
 Tippy, W. M. The Church, a Comviunity Force. New York, 1914. 
 
 Trawick, A. M. The City Church and its Social Mission. New York, 
 1913. 
 
 Vedder, H. C. The Gospel of Jesu^ Christ and the Problems of De- 
 mocracy. New York, 1914. 
 
 Ward, H. F. Poverty and Wealth. New York, 1915. 
 
 , The Social Creed of the Churches. 
 
 Ward, H. F., and Edwards, R. H. Christianizing Community Life. 
 New York, 1917. 
 
346 CLASSIFIED BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 
 
 For conservative types of thought, see the volumes of Proceedings of 
 the International Sunday School Association, published under various 
 titles by the Executive Committee, Chicago; also Sampey, J. R., 
 The International Lesson System, the History of its Origin and Develop- 
 ment. Nashville, 1911. Compare "Christian Training and the Re- 
 vival," in King, H. C, Personal and Ideal Elements iri Education. New 
 York, 1904. 
 
 For all phases of the reform movement in religious education, con- 
 sult the files of the magazine Religious Education, and also the volumes 
 of Proceedings of the Religious Education Association that preceded 
 the magazine. Several valuable summaries of current movements will 
 be found in the "Annual Surveys" presented at the conventions of the 
 Association and printed in the above named publications. Consult also 
 the files of the Biblical World. 
 
 Certain beginnings of the reform movement in Great Britain are 
 evidenced by the papers and resolutions of a conference called by the 
 British Sunday School Union. See Johnson, F. (editor), Bible Teaching 
 by Modern Methods. London, 1907. 
 
 On education with reference to the coming world order, see the 
 numbers of Religious Education throughout the year 1917. See also 
 Ballantine, W. G, Religious Education for the Coming Social Order. 
 Pamphlet, Boston, Pilgrim Press, 1917. ' 
 
 A composite picture of present points of view can be had by referring 
 to articles in Nelson's Encyclopedia of Sunday Schools and Religious 
 Education. 3 vols. New York. 
 
 Two recent utterances on the relation of religious education to 
 democracy are: Winchester, B. S. "The Churches of the Federal 
 Council and Week-Day Religious Instruction," a report made to the 
 Federal Council at St, Louis, December, 1916, and published in the Pro- 
 ceedings of the Council; and a pamphlet by Athearn, W. S. "Relig- 
 ious Education and American Democracy," Maiden, Mass., 1916. 
 
 D 
 
 TEXT-BOOKS THAT HAVE GROWN OUT OF THE SOCIAL CONCEPTION 
 OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 
 
 In this list only such texts are included as seem to conceive of Chris- 
 tian education as a process of socializing conduct, purposes, and thought. 
 
CLASSIFIED BIBLIOGRAPHY 347 
 
 in the spirit of Jesus. Many lessons that enforce social duties are con- 
 tained, of course, in texts that presuppose one or another prcsocial 
 conception of Christian experience, but these texts arc not mentioned. 
 
 An extended annotated bibliograpliy of Graded Text-Books for the 
 Modem Sunday School, printed in 1914, can be had upon application 
 to the Religious Education Association, 1032 East ooth Street, Chicago. 
 For the latest list in each of the graded series, WTite to the various 
 publishers of lesson systems. The almost constantly growing lists of 
 the Association Press, of the National Board of the Young Women's 
 Christian Associations, and of the Missionary Education Movement 
 should be consulted also. 
 
 Text-books of social religion adapted to classes of a<lults and of older 
 adolescents are relatively numerous; texts for early and middle adoles- 
 cence are rare; for most of the years below adolescence non-existent, 
 
 1. For Classes of Adults and of Older Adolescents 
 
 Dole, C. F. The Citizen and the Neighbor. Boston, 1884. 
 Douglass, H. P. The New Home Missions. New York, 1914. 
 Edwards, R. H. Christianity and Amusements. New York, 1915. 
 Faunce, W. H. P. Social Aspects of Foreign Missions. New York. 
 
 1914. 
 Henderson, C. R. Social Duties from the Christian Point of View. 
 
 Chicago, 1913. 
 Jenks, J. W. The Political and Social Significance of the Teachings of 
 
 Jesus. New York, 1911. 
 Kent, C. F. The Social Teachings of the Prophets and Jesus. New 
 
 York, 1917. 
 Kent, C; F., and Jenks, J. W. The Making of a Nation. New York, 
 
 1912. 
 
 , The Testing of a Nation's Ideals. New York, 1914. 
 
 Mathew^s, S. The Individual and the Social Gospel. New York, 1914. 
 
 , The Social and Ethical Teaching of Jesus, Chicago, 1913. 
 
 , The Social Gospel. Philadelphia, 1910. 
 
 Nordell, P. A. The Modern Church. New York, Scribner Completely 
 
 Graded Series. 
 Rauschenbusch, W. The Social Principles of Jesus. New York, 1916. 
 Richardson, N. E. The Liquor Problem. New York, 1915. 
 , International Peace. Pamphlet. New York. Federal Council 
 
 of Churches, 1915. 
 
348 CLASSIFIED BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Scares, T. G. Social Institutions and Ideals of the Bible. New York, 
 
 1915. 
 Strong, J. Studies in the Gospel of the Kingdom, 
 , New series: Studies in Social Progress. Published periodically 
 
 by the American Institute of Social Service, New York. 
 Taft, A. B. Community Studies for Country Districts. New York, 
 
 1912. 
 Trawick, A. M. The City Church and its Social Mission. New York, 
 
 1913. 
 Ward, H. F. The Bible and Social Living. New York, etc., 1917. In- 
 ternational Graded Lessons. 
 , Poverty and Wealth. New York, etc., 1915. International 
 
 Graded Lessons. 
 
 , The Social Creed of the Churches. New York, 1912. 
 
 Ward, H. F., and Edwards, R. H. Christianizing Community Life, 
 
 New York, 1917. 
 
 2. For Classes in Early and Middle Adolescence 
 
 Gates, H. W. Heroes of the Faith. New York, Scribner Completely 
 
 Graded Series. 
 Hunting, H. B. Christian Life and Conduct. New York, Scribner 
 
 Completely Graded Series. 
 Jenks, J. W. Life Questions of High School Boys. New York, 1908. 
 Weston, S. A. The World as a Field for Christian Service. New York, 
 
 etc., International Graded Lessons. 
 
 3. For Younger Pupils 
 
 Cutting, Mrs. Charles, and Merrett, C. C. God the Loving Father and 
 His Children. New York, Scribner Completely Graded Series. 
 For primary pupils. 
 
 Dadmun, F. M. Living Together. Boston, 1915, the • new Beacon 
 Series. For primary pupils. 
 
 Everyland. A magazine intended to widen the social outlook of chil- 
 dren toward children of other races. New York. The Missionary 
 Education Movement. Adapted to primary and junior pupils. 
 
 Rankin, M. E. A Course for Beginners in Religious Education, with 
 Lessons for One Year for Children Five Years of Age. New York, 
 1917. Scribner Completely Graded Series. 
 
CLASSIFIED BIBLIOGRAPHY 349 
 
 E 
 
 CURRENT PROGRESS IN THE ORGANIZATION AND METHODS OF RE- 
 LIGIOUS EDUCATION IN CHURCH, DENOMINATION, AND COMMUNITY 
 
 A reform movement in the organization and methods of rcHgioii.s 
 education is more or less manifest in a multitude of pul)lif'ations, both 
 books and periodicals. The present short list is intended simply to 
 indicate the general direction of this movement. The reader should 
 not fail to consult the files of Religious Education for articles not here 
 listed. Whoever desires a complete picture of the situation in Protes- 
 tant circles in the United States should consult in addition the reports 
 of the Sunday School Council of Evangelical Denominations; the 
 Sunday-school magazines published by the different denominations; 
 the proceedings and the various circulars of the International Sunday 
 School Association; the reports of the Sunday School Commission of 
 the Federal Council; the reports of denominational commissions and 
 departments of religious education or of Sunday schools; the teachers' 
 books in each of the graded lesson series; the newer text-books for 
 teacher training, such as the "Modern Sunday School Manuals" 
 (published by a Methodist and Congregational syndicate), "The 
 Worker and His Work" series (published by the Methodist Book Con- 
 cern), and the handbooks on "Principles and Methods of Religious 
 Education" (published by the University of Chicago Press); finally, 
 the constantly enlarging lists of the denominational and other pub- 
 lishers of religious literature. 
 
 Typical of the endeavor to transform the Sunday school are the 
 following: 
 
 Athearn, W. S. The Church School. Boston, 1914. 
 
 Cope, H. F. Efficiency in the Sunday School. New York, 1912. 
 
 , The Evolution of the Sunday School. Boston and New York, 1911 
 
 , The Modern Sunday School and its Present-Day Task. New York, 
 
 1916. 
 
 Evans, H. F. The Sunday School Building and its Equipment. Chi- 
 cago, 1914. 
 
 Frayser, N. L. The Sunday School and Citizenship. Cincinnati, 1915. 
 
 Gates, H. W. Recreation and the Church. Chicago, 1917. 
 
 Hartshorne, H. Worship in the Sunday School. New York, 1913. 
 
 , Manual for Training in Worship. New York, 1915. 
 
 , The Book of Worship of the Church School. New York, 1915. 
 
350 CLASSIFIED BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Hutchlns, W. N. Graded Social Service for the Sunday School. Chi- 
 cago, 1914. 
 
 Richardson, N. E., and Loomis, O. E. The Boy Scout Movement Ap' 
 plied by the Church. New York, 1915. 
 
 The movement toward a community conception of the function of 
 religious education is represented by the following publications. Much 
 material will be added by the 1918 convention of the Religious Educa- 
 tion Association, which is to take this as its topic. 
 
 Athearn, W. S. The City Institute for Religious Teachers. Chicago, 
 1915. 
 
 , A Community System of Religious Education. Boston, 1917. 
 
 , Correlation of Church Schools and Public Schools. Pamphlet. 
 
 Maiden, Mass., 1917. 
 
 Coe, G. A. "A General View of the Movement for Correlating Re- 
 ligious Education with Public Instruction." Religious Education. 
 XI (1916), 109-122. See also other articles in this and the pre- 
 ceding volume of Religious Education. 
 
 "Co-operation in Christian Education." New York, Federal Council 
 Report, 1917. 
 
 Wood, C. A. School and College Credit for Outside Bible Study. Yoh- 
 kers-on-Hudson, 1917. 
 
 See also references under "Educational Relations between State and 
 Church" in this Bibliography. 
 
 P 
 
 THE FAMILY AS AN AGENCY FOR SOCIAL-RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 
 
 Consult "A Brief Bibliography on Religious Nurture in the Home." 
 Prepared and annotated by Moxcey, M. E. Religious Education, X 
 (1915), 610-612, and add the following subsequent works: 
 Goodsell, W. A History of the Family as a Social and Educational 
 
 Institution. New York, 1915. 
 Moxcey, M. E. Girlhood and Character. New York, 1916. 
 
 G 
 
 THE RELATION OF THE STATE TO RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 
 
 There is a long series of articles and allusions in the Reports of the 
 United States Commissioner of Education. Of especial significance are 
 
 ' 
 
CLASSIFIED BIBLIOGRAPHY 351 
 
 the Reports of 1888-9, 1894-5 (the New York controversy), 1S9G-7 
 (statistics of religious exercises in public schools), 1897-8 (the New York 
 controversy, etc.). 
 
 The United States Biu*eau of Education Bulletin No. 7 (1908) re- 
 ports important judicial decisions. 
 
 On the New York controversy see also Bourne, W. O., Ilittory of the 
 Public School Society of the City of New York (New York, 1870); a 
 chapter in Burns, J. A., The Catholic School System in the United States 
 (New York, 1908), and Hall, A. J., Religious Ediication in the Public 
 Schools of the State and City of New York (Chicago, 1914). 
 
 The celebrated Edgerton case is reported in 76 Wisconsin Reports, 
 Conover, 177. For the Cincinnati case, see 23 Ohio Stats Rejmrts, 
 Granger, 21-254, and the references already given in a footnote on 
 page 255. 
 
 The constitutional provisions, laws, and court decisions are brought 
 together in a convenient volume by Brown, S. W., The Secidarizaiion of 
 American Education (New York, 1912). The same author brought 
 the matter down to date in "Present Legal Status, etc.," in Religions 
 Education, XI (1916), 103-108. 
 
 On the history of this matter in the Northwest Territory, see articles 
 by Mayo in the Report of the United States Commissioner of Education 
 for 1894-5. 
 
 On Massachusetts history see the first, second, and twelfth Annual 
 Reports of Horace Mann, and Report of the United States Commissioner 
 of Education for 1897-8. 
 
 On the Catholic position see a speech by Archbishop Ireland in Pro- 
 ceedings of the National Education Association, 1890, pp. 179^.; Burns, 
 J. A., The Catholic School System in the United States (New York, 1908); 
 O'Connell, C. J., Christian Education (New York, 1906); McQuaid, 
 B. J., The Public School Question (Boston, 1876); McCabe, J., T-he 
 Truth about Secular Education (London, 1906); articles on "Schools," 
 "Education," etc., in the Catholic Encycloposdia, and the Proceedings 
 of the Catholic Education Association, Columbus, Ohio. 
 
 A discussion that occurred in the National Education Association in 
 1889 is printed in the Proceedings and also separately under the title, 
 Denominational Schools (Syracuse, Bardeen, 1889). 
 
 Arguments for entire separation of religious instruction from the 
 public schools are contained in Mead, E. D., The Rxmmn Catholic Church 
 and the Public Schools (Boston, 1890); Spear, S. T., Religion and the 
 State, or the Bible and the Public Schools (New York, 1876); Crooker, 
 J. T., Religious Freedom in American Education (Boston, 1903); and 
 
352 CLASSIFIED BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Harris, W. T., "The Separation of the Church from Schools Supported 
 by Public Taxes" {Proceedings of the National Education Association^ 
 1903). 
 
 On the controversy in Great Britain, see Riley, A., and others, 
 The Religious Question in Public Education (London, 1911). 
 
 For practices and points of view in various countries, see Spiller, G., 
 Moral Education in Eighteen Countries (London, 1909); Sadler, M. E., 
 Moral Instruction and Training in Schools, 2 vols. (London, 1908); 
 Proceedings and Papers of the First International Moral Education Con- 
 gress (London, David Nutt, 1908); Memoires sur l' Education Morale 
 [the second Moral Education Congress] (The Hague, Nijhoff, 1912); 
 also a volume of Papers Contributed by American Writers to the second 
 Congress (Brooklyn, 1912). 
 
 Consult, on the whole topic, the indices of Religious Education, and 
 see especially the number for February, 1911, and a bibliography (for 
 free distribution) of *' Instruction in Religion in Relation to Public Ed- 
 ucation," which was published in Vol. X (1915), pp. 613-624. Add to 
 this bibliography the subsequently published article by Sheridan, H. J., 
 *' Religious Education and the Public Schools of Ontario," in Religious 
 Education, XII (1917), 15-19, and the prize essay by Rugh, C. E., The 
 Essential Place of Religion in Education. Published by the National 
 Education Association, Ann Arbor, 1916. 
 
 On the relations between the public schools and the movement for 
 week-day religious instruction by the churches, see Religious Educa- 
 tion, Vol. XII. 
 
 H 
 
 THE SOCIAL CAPACITIES OF CHILDREN 
 
 On the instinctive endowment of man, see: 
 
 McDougall, W. Introduction to Social Psychology. Boston, 1909. 
 
 Thorndike, E. L. The Original Nature of Man, being Vol. I of his 
 Educational Psychology. New York, 1913. A brief summary of 
 original traits is given in his Education. New York, 1912, Chap- 
 ter V. See also his Educational Psychology, Briefer Course. 
 
 Representative of the recapitulation theory are: 
 
 Bolton, F. E. Principles of Education. New York, 1910, Chapters 
 
 IV, V, VI. 
 Fiske, G. W. Boy Life and Self-Government. New York, 1910. 
 
CLASSIFIED BIBLIOGRAPHY 353 
 
 Hall, G. S. Educational Problems. 2 vols. New York, 1911, espe- 
 cially Chapter IV, "The Religious Training of Children and the 
 Sunday School," and Chapter V, "Moral Education." 
 
 Partridge, G. E. Genetic Philosophy of Education. New York, 1912. 
 This work is an epitome of the educational theories of G. Stanley 
 Hall. See especially pp. 50-58, and Chapter XII, "Religious 
 Education." 
 
 On the limitations of the recapitulation theory, see: 
 
 Davidson, P. E. The Recapitidation Theory and Human Infancy. 
 
 New York, 1914. Note his bibliography. 
 National Herbart Society, First and Second Year Books. Chicago, 1895, 
 
 1896. 
 Thorndike, E. L. The Original Nature of Man, being Vol. I of his 
 
 Educational Psychology. New York, 1913. 
 
 For various points of view with respect to childhood religion, the 
 conversion of children, etc., see: 
 
 Bonner, C. TJw Christ, the Church, and the Child. London, 1911. 
 
 Dawson. G. E. The Child and His Religion. Chicago, 1909. 
 
 Koons, W. G. The Child's Religious Life. New York, 1903. 
 
 Leuba, J. H. "Children's Conceptions of God and Religious Educa- 
 tion." Religious Education, XII (1917), 5-15. 
 
 Mumford, E. E. R. The Dawn of Religion in the Mind of the Child. 
 London, 1915. 
 
 RisheU, C. W. The Child as God's Child. New York, 1904. 
 
 Stephens, T. (editor). The Child and Religion. New York, 1905. 
 
 St. John, E. P. Child Nature and Child Nurture. Boston, 1911. An 
 outline for study classes, with bibhographies. 
 
 I 
 
 THEORIES OF METHOD IN SOCIAL INSTRUCTION AND TRAININQ 
 
 Bagley, W. C. The Educative Process. New York, 1910. 
 
 , School Discipline. New York, 1914. 
 
 Cabot, E. L. "Methods of Ethical Teaching." Religious Education, 
 
 VI (1911), 542. 
 Chubb, P. "Direct Moral Education." Religious Educaiixm, II (1907), 
 
 164. 
 
354 CLASSIFIED BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 Coe, G. A. "Virtue and the Virtues." Proceedings of the National 
 
 Education Association, 1911; printed also in Religums Education, 
 
 VI (1911), 486. 
 Dewey, J. Moral Principles in Education. Boston, 1910. 
 
 , Democracy and Education. New York, 1916. 
 
 Gould, F. J. Moral Instruction: Its Theory and Practice, London, 
 
 1913. 
 Griggs, E. H. Moral Education. New York, 1904. 
 Healy, W. Honesty: A Study of Causes and Treatment of Dishonesty 
 
 among Children. Indianapolis, 1915. 
 Kirkpatrick, E. A. The Individunl in the Making. Boston, 1911. 
 
 y The Use of Money. Indianapolis, 1915. 
 
 McMurry, F. M. Elementary School Standards. Yonkers-on-Hudson, 
 
 1914. 
 
 , How to Study. Boston, 1909. 
 
 Moxcey, M. E. Girlhood and CJiarader. New York, 1916. 
 Neumann, H. "Some Misconceptions of Moral Education." One of 
 
 the Papers by American Writers to the Second International Moral 
 
 Education Congress. 
 Palmer, G. H. Ethical and Moral Instruction in Schools. Boston, 1899. 
 Rugh, C. E., and others. Moral Training in Public Schools. Boston, 
 
 1907. 
 Shand, A. F. The Foundations of Character. London, 1914. 
 Sharpe, F. C. "The Development of Moral Thoughtfulness in 
 
 Schools." One of the Papers by American Writers to the Second 
 
 International Moral Education Congress. 
 Sheldon, W. L. An Ethical Sunday School. London, 1900. 
 Sneath, E. H., and Hodges, G. Moral Training in the School and Home, 
 
 New York, 1913. 
 Strayer, G. H. A Short Course in the Teaching Process. New York, 1912. 
 Swift, E. J. Learning and Doing. Indianapolis, 1914. 
 Taylor, C. K. The Moral Education of School Children. Philadelphia, 
 
 1912. 
 Tufts, J. H. "How Far is Formal Systematic Instruction Desirable 
 
 in Moral Training in Schools?" Religious Education, vol. IH, 
 
 October, 1908, p. 121 and /. 
 
 On transfer of training, a bibliography of 68 titles will be found in 
 Hewins, N. P. The Doctrine of Formal Discipline in the Light of Ex- 
 
CLASSIFIED BIBLIOGRAPHY 355 
 
 perimerdal Investigation. Baltimore, 1916. For statements of the 
 problem, and for the chief points of view, see: 
 
 Bagley, W. C. The Educative Process. New York, 1910. 
 
 Colvin, S. S. "Some Facts in Partial Justification of the So-called 
 Dogma of Formal Discipline." Pamphlet, Bulletin No. 2 of the 
 University of Illinois School of Education. 1910. 
 
 O'Shea, M. V. Edux^ation as Adjustment. New York, 1905. 
 
 A symposium by Angell, Pillsbury, and Judd, in the Educational Re- 
 view, June, 1908. 
 
 Thorndike and Woodworth. "The Influence of Improvement in One 
 Mental Function upon the Efficiency of Other Functions." 
 Psychological Renew, Will, 24:7-2Ql; 348-395; 553-564. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Note. — This Index contains the names of authors who are 
 referred to in the text. For other names see the Classified 
 Bibliography. 
 
 Academies, Denominational, 267 f. 
 Activities, Education throughi, 81 ; 
 
 90; 240; 272 f.; 310 f.; see also 
 
 Practice, Social, as a Method of 
 
 Social Education. 
 Adjustment, Social, as an aim in edu- 
 cation, 16. 
 Adolescence, 148 f., et passim; 157- 
 
 160; 180; 319; 332. 
 Aims, The, of Christian education. 
 
 Chapter V; 76 f. 
 Albro, J. A., 100 (note 2). 
 American Simday School Union, The, 
 
 286. 
 Ames, E. S., 148 f. 
 Amusements, 221. 
 Anger, 122; 130; 176. 
 Animism, 144 f. 
 Antisocial instincts, habits, etc., 
 
 165 ff. 
 AppUcation, Making the, 97. 
 Approval and disapproval, 122; 
 
 171 fl. 
 Aristotle, 166. 
 Ari;, 69. 
 
 Art museums, 4. 
 Asceticism, 56. 
 Authority in education, 42flf.; 85; 
 
 172; 193; 261; 296 f.; 305; 
 
 335 f. 
 
 Baldwin, J. M., 86 (note). 
 
 Barnes, E., 144. 
 
 Bedales School, 21. 
 
 Bible, The, and state schools, 250 flf . ; 
 
 257; 260 fl. 
 BibUcal material in the curriculum, 
 
 67 f.; 98; 103; 109; 113 ff.; 
 
 222; 305 f.; 313 fl. 
 Bibliography, Classified, 343-354. 
 
 Boys: 
 
 Defective observation of, 156 
 Segregation from girls, 162; 209 f. 
 Boys' clubs, 162 f.; 231; 232. 
 
 Brotherly love. Instinctive roots of, 
 126 fl. 
 
 Brown, W. A., 227 (note). 
 
 BushneU, H., 145. 
 
 Catechisms, 316; 340 (note). 
 Catechumens, Classes of, 231. 
 Catholicism (Roman), \Tii; 65; 256 f.; 
 
 Chapter XX; 304 fl. 
 Causality, 144. 
 Character, 53 f . ; 184 ff . 
 Children: 
 
 And the church, 110 ff. 
 And social issues, 60 f.; 91 (note). 
 Child evangelism, see Evangelism. 
 Child labor. 14; 45; 114; 220. 
 Child reUgion, 75; 101 f.; 108; 
 
 142-146; 181. 
 Children's faith and credulity. 
 
 Chapter XI. 
 Children's faults and limitations. 
 
 Chapter XII; 168 fl. 
 Children's interests. 109 f. ; Chap- 
 ter X; 142 ff.; 318 f. 
 Children's plasticity. 226. 
 Children's standards, 106 fl. 
 Observing children. 272. 
 Christ, Social redemption through, 
 6; Leading children to, 309 fl.; 
 see also Decision Days and Evan- 
 gelism. 
 Christian experience, 74 fl.; 81; 98; 
 306 ; 327 f . ; 329 f . ; see also Con- 
 version. 
 Christianizing education. 4; 6; 75. 
 
 357 
 
358 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Christian religion, The," vii; 54fif.; 
 
 92 f . ; 249 f . ; 268 f . ; 284 f . ; 333 f. 
 Christian unity, 91 f.; 281 f. 
 Church, The, and education, 6; 8f.; 
 
 14; 17; 28; 53; 62; Chapter 
 
 VIII; 98; 110; 146; Chapter 
 
 XVI; Chapter XVII; 265; 
 
 317 f.; 323; 329 f.; 332; 341 f. 
 Clubs of boys and of giris, 162 f. ; 231 ; 
 
 232 
 Coe, G. A., 40 (note); 123; 135 
 
 (note); 137 (note); 142 (note); 
 
 148 (note 1); 181 (note); 244 
 
 (note). 
 Colleges, Denominational, 267 f.; 
 
 273 flf.; 280 f. 
 "Common" people, The, 226 f. 
 Community, The, and education, 20; 
 
 36; 221; 229; 323. 
 Conscience, 172 f. 
 Continuity of child growth, 151 flf.; 
 
 179. 
 Conversion, 181 f.; 226; 324 f.; 327; 
 
 330. 
 Creed, Educational use of the, 316; 
 
 319. 
 Criminality, 158. 
 Crowd, The. 38 £F.; 47; 108 (note); 
 
 132. 
 Cultvire epochs, 152. 
 Curiosity, 144. 
 Curriculiun, The, 21 flf.; 66-69; 81 f.; 
 
 Chapter IX; 196 f. 
 
 Davidson, P. E., 155 (note 3). 
 
 Davidson, T., 32 f. 
 
 Dawson, G. E., 144. 
 
 Decision days, 77 f.; 331 flC.; see also 
 
 Evangelism. 
 Deliberative group. The, 38 ff.; 175; 
 
 188; 210; 212; 312. 
 Democracy, 16; 54 flf.; lllf.; 168; 
 
 175; 185 f.; 210 fl.; 259; 262; 
 
 305; 313 flf.; 325 f.; 338. 
 Denominations, ReUgious, Chapter 
 
 XVIII; Chapter XIX; 291 f.; 
 
 see also Sectarianism. 
 Departments of religious education. 
 
 Denominational, Chapter XVIII. 
 Depravity, 169 flf. 
 
 Devotional life. The, see Worship. 
 Dewey, J., x. 
 " Direct" methods of teaching morals, 
 
 190 flf. 
 Directors of religious education, 278; 
 
 279; see also Supervision of Re- 
 ligious Education. 
 Dispositions, Children's, 133 f. 
 
 Dogmas, Appreciation of, 69. 
 Dogmatism, 28; 65; 66; 74 flf.; 144; 
 
 169; 262; 296 f.; Chapter XXI; 
 
 317; 320 f.; 327; 335 f.; 338 f. 
 Du Bois, P., 128 (note). 
 
 Ecclesiasticism, see Church, The, and 
 Education. 
 
 Economic order. The, 55; 105; 
 217 flf.; 245. 
 
 Editors as educators, 279. 
 
 Education, Nature of , 13 f.; 182; the 
 educative process, 18 flf. ; Chap- 
 ter VII. 
 
 Efficiency, see Social Phases of Educa- 
 tion. 
 
 Egoism, see Selfishness. 
 
 EUot, C. W., 341 (note). 
 
 Emerson, R. W., 32; 87; 94. 
 
 Equality of the sexes, 211. 
 
 Ethics, Theories of, 42. 
 
 Eugenics and education, 29 f.; 33; 
 221. 
 
 Evangelism, 77 f.; 182 f.; 268; see 
 also Conversion. 
 
 Evolution, 31 flf.; 167. 
 
 Faith. 57; 83 f.; 141; 310 f. 
 Family, The, 5; 14; 70 f.; 80 f.; 98; 
 
 105; Chapter XV.; 231; 240- 
 
 243. 
 Fear, 144. 
 Federal Council of Churches, The, 
 
 285 f. 
 Feeney, B., 296 (note). 
 Fellowship as a process in education, 
 
 88 f.; 90; 151; 175 f.; 319 f. 
 Fichte, J. H., 26. 
 Fihal affection, 127 f. 
 Finances of the church school, 245 flf. 
 Freedom of purpose, 336-338. 
 Freedom of the child, 26. 
 Freedom of thought and of speech, 
 
 47 (note); 249; 290; 312; 335; 
 
 337 f. 
 Freedom. Political, 27; 47; 249; 312. 
 Fremantle, W. H., 6. 
 Froebel, 27; 80. 
 Future hfe, The, 83. 
 
 Gangs of Boys, 154. 
 
 Genetic view of mind. The, 31. 
 
 German education, 30 (note). 
 
 Girls, 156; 161 f.; 209 f.; 231. 
 
 Giving, Training in, 246 f. 
 
 God, 6; 7; 54 f.; 73; 95; 112; 164; 
 
 268; 272; 311 f.; 313 ff.; 328. 
 Gradation of curriculum material, 66 ; 
 
 162; 196 f.; 306 ff. 
 
INDEX 
 
 359 
 
 Gratitude, 143 f. 
 
 Greed. 122; 129, 
 
 Green, T. H., 37. 
 
 Gregariousness, 122. 
 
 Growth as an aim of education, 55; 
 64; 66; 71 fl.; 98; as determin- 
 ing the order and the process, 
 105 ff.; 147 fl., 162; 179; 196 f.; 
 306 fl.; 331 fl. 
 
 Guilt, 172. 
 
 Habit and habit-formation, 32; 69; 
 
 133 f.; 151 f.; 159 fl.; 165; 170 f.; 
 
 189; 307. 
 HaU, G. S., 148. 
 Halpin, E. A., 298 (notes 1 and 2); 
 
 299 (note); 301 (notes 1 and 2). 
 Health, 169 fl.; 221. 
 Hegel, 26. 
 Herbart, 27. 
 Hours of labor, 220. 
 Housing problem, The, 221. 
 Hiunan nature, Chapter X; its modi- 
 
 flabiUty, 135 fl. 
 Hunting instinct, The, 122; 130, 
 
 Idealism, metaphysical, 26; 32 f.; 
 
 35; Social, see Social Idealism. 
 Ideals and ideaUzing, 152. 
 Imagination, 115 f.; 196; 198 ff. 
 Imitation, 124; 139; 170; 189. 
 Income and education, 220. 
 Indignation, 143 f. 
 "Indirect" methods of teaching 
 
 morals, 190 fl. 
 Indidivual, What is an? 38; 56 f.; 
 
 85; the individual as an end in 
 
 education, 27; 29; 35; Chapter 
 
 IV; 53; 221. 
 Individualism, 38; 47 f.; 56 f.; 99; 
 
 268 f.; 275; 277; 284. 
 Industrial conditions as affecting 
 
 education, 33 f. 
 Industrial training, see Vocational 
 
 Education. 
 Initiation, Education as, 89. 
 Initiative, 213. 
 Instinct and education, 32 f.; 36; 
 
 41; 50; 120 fl.; 129 fl.; 133 f.; 
 
 141 fl.; 151; 161; 165; 170; 172. 
 Instruction as a part of education, 
 
 53; 64 f.; 82; 310 f. 
 InteUectualism in religious education, 
 
 74 fl.; 193; 296; 305 f.; 338 fl. 
 Interest and education, 9; 110; 154. 
 International Sunday School Associa- 
 tion, The, 286 f. 
 
 Interruptions of the educational pro- 
 gram, 77 f. 
 Introspection, 62. 
 
 Jealoasy. 122. 
 
 Jesus. 54 f.; 75; 94; 145; 193; 213; 
 
 314 f. 
 Justice. 34; 45; 48; 68 ff.; 93 f.; 126- 
 
 144; 158; 176; 208-210. 
 Juvenile courts, 14; 45. 
 
 Kant, 26; 31. 
 King, I., 144 (note 3). 
 Kingdom of God, see Democracy. 
 Knowledge and life, 21 ff. 
 Knowledge as an end in education, 
 41; 64. 
 
 Labor, Education through, see Ac- 
 tivities, Education through, and 
 Practice, Social, as a Method of 
 Social Education. 
 
 Labor problem. The. 220. 
 
 Landerziehungsheim, The, 21. 
 
 Lay workers in religious education, 
 279 f. 
 
 Leaders in religious education, Pro- 
 ducing, 270 ff. <, 
 
 Learning process. The, Chapter XIV. 
 
 Liberalism, Educational tendencies 
 of. Chapter XXIV. 
 
 Literature, Appreciation of, 69. 
 
 Love, Christian, 7; 55 f.; 57; 68 
 72; 75 f.; 79 f.; 83 f.; 93 f. 
 lllf.; 126 ff.; 168; 178; 210 
 227; 265; 268; 284 f.; 315 
 328. 
 
 105; 158; 216; 
 
 Mackintosh, H. R., 329 (note). 
 
 Mann, H., 27. 
 
 Marriage, 70 f . 
 223 f. 
 
 MarshaU, H. R., 131 (note). 
 
 Mastery and submission, 122; 129 f. 
 
 McDougaU, W., 121; 143. 
 
 Men and women, 209 f.; 211. 
 
 Methods of teaching morals, 190 ff. 
 
 Ministry, The, and religious educa- 
 tion, 230 f . ; 274 f. ; 277 f. 
 
 Missionary Education Movement, 
 The, 287 f. 
 
 Missions, 82; 98; 114; 231; 280; 
 281. 
 
 Moral character, 63 f.; 184-186. 
 
 Moral hypersensitiveness, 187. 
 
 Moral priggery, 186. 
 
 Moral self-consciousness, 187 ff. 
 
 Moral snobbery, 186. 
 
360 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Moralizing, 191; 201. 
 
 Motives, Education of, 41 f.; 66 f.; 
 
 71flf.; 98. 
 Mumford, E. E. R., 84. 
 Mysticism, 57. 
 
 Nationalism, ix ; 38 (note) ; 59. 
 Nature, Appreciation of, 69. 
 Nature, Education as a part of, 32. 
 
 Oberly, H. H., 320 (note). 
 Observation as an element in the 
 
 training of workers, 272. 
 Occupations, Preparation for, see 
 
 Vocational Education. 
 Organized classes, 81. 
 Outline courses. Faults of, 273. 
 
 Parenthood and the parental instinct, 
 123 ff.; 129; 131 f.; 142 fl.; 
 156; 157; 223 f.; 271. 
 
 Parochial schools, 257 fl. 
 
 Pastor, The, and reUgious education, 
 230 f.; 274 f.; 277 f. 
 
 Patriotism, 59. 
 
 Personality of the teacher, see 
 Teacher, The. 
 
 Persons, Value of, 44 f.; 80; 102 fl.; 
 176 f.; 197 f. 
 
 Pestalozzi, 27. 
 
 Philosophy, Appreciation of, 69. 
 
 Philosophy of the new education, 
 Chapter III. 
 
 Physiological factors in conduct, 
 169 fl. 
 
 Pity, 126; 144. 
 
 Play, playgi-ounds, and the play- 
 groimd movement, 14; 20; 44 
 (note 1); 89; 105 fl.; 221. 
 
 Pleasure and pain as factors in edu- 
 cation, 89; 151; 165 f.; 170; 
 173 f; 177 f.; 203; 214. 
 
 Political philosophy and education, 
 30 f. 
 
 Practice, Social, as a method of so- 
 cial education, 4; 69 f.; 166; 
 193 f.; 212 f.; 215 f. 
 
 Pragmatism and education, 34 fl. 
 
 Prayer, see Worship. 
 
 Priesthood, 96; 226. 
 
 Professional workers in religious ed- 
 ucation, 277 fl. 
 
 Professorship of religious education. 
 The, 280 f. 
 
 Property, The right of, 217 fl. 
 
 Prophetism, 54; 256 f. 
 
 Protestantism, viii; 28; 65; 90; 
 256 f.; 260 f.; 287; Chapters 
 XXI-XXIV. 
 
 Psychology and education, 29 ; 34 f. ; 
 
 109 f.; 168 fl.; 192. 
 Psychotherapy, 180 (note). 
 Public libraries, 14. 
 Public schools, see State Schools. 
 Pugnacity, 122; 130. 
 Pimishments, 176 fl. 
 
 Race betterment as an aim of educa- 
 tion, 32. 
 Recapitulation theory, The, 149 fl. ; 
 
 181. 
 Recitation, The, 20. 
 Reflection as an aim in education, 48; 
 
 98; 152; 190; 193. 
 Religion, can it be taught ? 74 fl. 
 Religion and sectarianism, 255 fl. 
 Religious Education Association, The, 
 
 285. 
 Retaliation, 176. 
 Revivals, see Evangelism. 
 Ritschlian movement in theology. 
 
 The, 35. 
 RituaUsm, Educational tendencies of. 
 
 Chapter XXII. 
 Rivah-y, 122; 129. 
 Rousseau, J. J., 27. 
 Rules, Educational use of, 42 fl.; 48; 
 
 172; 312. 
 
 Saloon, The, 221. 
 
 Salvation, 6; 53; 56; 97. 
 
 Schelhng, 26. 
 
 School life as a phase of education; 
 
 108; see also State Schools. 
 Scientific movement, The, and edu- 
 cation, 28 fl.; 35; 169; 227; 267; 
 
 290. 
 Secretaries, Denominational, 279 f. 
 Secretaries, Sunday-school, 238. 
 Sectarianism, 255 fl.; 260; 284; 
 
 291 f. 
 Sedgwick, A., 155 (note). 
 Self-consciousness and self-control, 
 
 121; 134 f.; 187-190; 226. 
 Self-expression, 26. 
 Self-government, 19; 175; 240. 
 Self-involution, 44 (note 2); 61 f.; 
 
 187-190. 
 Selfishness, 148; Chapter XIII; 328. 
 Self-reaUzation, 15; 56 f. 
 Self-sacrifice, 48; 50. 
 Sermons to children, 201 f.; 231. 
 Sex, sex attraction, and sex intruo 
 
 tion, 123; 128; 132; 153; 155 f.; 
 
 160 f.; 167; 211; 223 fl. 
 Shand, A. F., 143. 
 Sin, Chapter XIII; 328. 
 
INDEX 
 
 3G1 
 
 Skill as an aim in education, 41, 
 Sloan, P. J., 303 (note). 
 "Social," Meaning of, 38 ff. 
 Social idealism, 37; 55 fl.; 64; 185. 
 Social phases of education: 
 Society the educator, 14 f. 
 Social aims of education: Adjust- 
 ment and efficiency, 16; 29;;: 
 democracy, 54 fif. ; justice, 
 58 f.; welfare, 58; world-so- 
 ciety, 59 f. ; social reconstruc- 
 tion, 18; 230. 
 Social classes, 168. 
 Social heredity, 86; 194. 
 Social nature of man. The, Chapter 
 
 X. 
 Social process in education. The, 
 
 18 f.; 42; 80 fif.; 90; 240. 
 Social strains, 33 f. ; 48; 54, 
 Social theory of education sum- 
 marized, 23 f. 
 Social vice, 225. 
 Social pvirpose, Effect of, upon 
 
 churches, 284 fif. 
 Social significance of the modern 
 
 state, The, 248 flf. 
 Social tendencies of dogmatic Protes- 
 tantism, 311 flf.; of ritualism, 
 322 f . ; of evangelicalLsm, 325 f . 
 Society and the church, 226 flf. 
 Socrates, 166. 
 "Soft pedagogy," 49 f. 
 Standards in education, 36; 231; 
 
 234; 238 flf. 
 State, The, and the individual, 46 f . ; 
 and the church. Chapter XVII; 
 State schools, \iii; 8; 23; 36; Chapter 
 
 XVII. 
 Stories as a means of education, 
 
 198 flf. 
 Stout, G. F., 143 (note 1). 
 Suggestion as a process in education, 
 87 f.; 96; 116; 139 f.; 189; 191. 
 Sunday school, The, 3f.; 5; 221; 
 Chapter XVI; 267; 327; 329 flf.; 
 333. 
 Simday School Council, The, 286. 
 Sunday school superintendent. The, 
 
 236 f. 
 Supervision of religious education, 
 
 234 flf. 
 Surveys, community, 221, 
 Swickerath, R., 297 (note 1). 
 
 Tagore, R., 218 (note). 
 
 Teacher, The, 19; 65; 78 f.; 80; 97; 
 
 234; 238; 255 f.; 262; 270 flf.; 
 
 305. 
 
 Teacher training, see Training of 
 Workers. 
 
 Tender regard as a phase of society, 
 126. 
 
 Tcrtullian, 145. 
 
 Tests of education, .36; 2:M; 238 ff. 
 
 Theological semmaries, 27S f. ; 2H() f. ; 
 290 flf. 
 
 Theology. 35. 
 
 Theory. Nature of, Clwptcr I. 
 
 Thomdike, E. L., 121; 126; 132; 
 155 (notes 2 and :i). 
 
 Thought and action, 194 ir. ; scm> also 
 Reflcciion as an Aim in Educa- 
 tion. 
 
 Time-problem, The, in religioiis edu- 
 cation. 243-245. 
 
 Todd, J., 101 (note 1). 
 
 Toynbec, A., 37. 
 
 Training of workers, 28; 79 f.; 
 270 flf.; 290 ff. 
 
 Training-schools for lay workers. 
 279 f. 
 
 Transfer of training. 202 ff. 
 
 Tui'ning points in character, 178 ff. 
 
 Tylor's view of animism, 145. 
 
 UnemplojTnent, 221. 
 
 Unfolding, Education as, 15; 53. 
 
 Union of the churches, see Christian 
 
 Unity. 
 Universities and religious education, 
 
 289 ff. 
 
 Vice, 22; 225. 
 
 Virtues, Study of the, 104 f.; 194 ff. 
 Vocational education, 8; 16 f.; 31; 
 33; 41; 62 f.; 70; 105; 221. 
 
 Wage-workers, 33 f. 
 
 War, ix; 59 f.; 130 f.; 168. 
 
 Week-day religious instruction, 
 231 f.; 244. 
 
 Will, Education of the, 56; 79. 
 
 Women. The place of, in the demo- 
 cracy of God, 70 f.; 130; 161; 
 209 f. 
 
 World-society as an aim of religious 
 education, 59 f. 
 
 Worship and its placojn education, 
 73: 77; 84; 92-W98; 221 ff.; 
 232; 271; 316 f.; 321 ff. 
 
 Young Men's and Young Women's 
 Christian Associations, The, 154; 
 268. 
 
 Young People's Societies, 231; 232; 
 267. 
 
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