USA > Illinois > Cook County > Chicago > The Religious Education Association : proceedings of the first annual convention, Chicago, February 10-12, 1903 > Part 19
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them. They must come to the front, and rise to that sense of responsibility which shall aid in creating a bet- ter civilization. In doing this the public schools can furnish suggestions for our educational work in religion, and religion can enrich and complete the instructing capacity of the teacher, professor, and academic leader.
2. The new organization must give the Bible fresh power and significance. As President Rhees well said, the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures are the natural text- book of our race in religious matters. The twentieth century already beholds a marvelous growth in the study and exploration of the Bible. The solemn necessity is laid upon us of rendering these sixty-six books in terms of noble and adequate interpretation. This work cannot be done by the ordinary means of public education. It cannot be accomplished by the home alone, for the American family is engrossed and burdened with life's cares. It cannot be wrought out by any one school of theologians or by any single denomination. This mighty undertaking waits for its consummation at the hands of many men and many minds, at the hands of a catholic, truly Christian body, forming a vast reservoir of truth and energy.
The ordinary Sunday school is waiting. The help it so sorely needs must come from such a source as this which conserves the old, welcomes the new, and speaks with the authority of consecrated scholarship.
3. This movement must establish wiser, more effective relations between organized religion and society. The gospel of Jesus has been well called "the enthusiasm of humanity." Amid the discontent and restlessness of our time, questions that are full of dire portent find in this spirit their solution. Where we enlarge the scope of our Sunday school we guard our children against the gross selfishness, the bitter misunderstandings, the rank injus- tices of society.
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The mercantile world is full of opportunities for character-building. Integrity, honor, generosity, man- hood are formed in the stress and storm of the world's busy marts. But the grandest types of human character are found in those who obey the inspiration of an inward and higher law.
Statutes are necessary to good government. They are the legal landmarks which indicate progress. But only when public opinion rises to commanding force can jus- tice attain to righteousness and the law expand into the gospel.
Such a movement as this is timely. It reinforces the cause of brotherhood and promotes social readjustment. Directly or indirectly, it inevitably does this work; for moral and religious education cannot be advocated and developed all over our broad land with any other result than a truer, kindlier, more Christlike consciousness, permeating and leavening every human relationship.
4. We aim to strengthen the church and to rally the forces of organized Christianity. Belief is essential to the victorious. A new Puritanism is dawning on the sky of our century. We are building as of old on the granite of conviction. Too long has reaction been at its deadly work. The American people thought they needed less religion. They really need more religion.
Many good souls are living on their spiritual inheri- tance; many thoughtless individuals are in debt wholly to a religious momentum from the loyal and saintly men and women of the past. We are on the eve of a great re- ligious revival. Such an Association as this, embodying representatives from nearly all our states and from beyond our borders, must inevitably exert an immeasurable influ- ence. Stirred into awakened life, the home, the Sunday school, and the church will together convince the people of the transcendent need of religious convictions, from which spring joys for the present and hope for the future,
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Am I portraying a utopian scheme, or am I speak- ing to reasonable expectations? I deeply believe in the possibilities enumerated. Let us all believe deeply, hope largely, expect mightily; then will that enthusiasm be created which is always the pledge and promise of all great transactions.
REV. CASPAR W. HIATT, D.D.,
PASTOR EUCLID AVENUE CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, CLEVELAND, OHIO
The scope and purpose of this movement, affecting and cohering so many and mighty and seemingly unre- lated interests, is the scope and purpose of the ocean, which drinks up all the streams that splash from hills and pour through plains, but gives them back again in rain for the harvest and tonic for the health; which seems to divide the continents and archipelagoes, but really holds them in its embrace and binds them together again by shining and convenient and eternal paths. I confess that the immensity of this undertaking embarrasses imagina- tion and almost staggers faith. Moreover, it affords abundant room for criticism by those would-be defenders of established order, the mildly optimistic pessimists, the severely radical conservatives, who love yesterday more than today, and would rather preserve an antiquity than expand a future. There will always be a contingent of people who will be unable to travel the distances of this movement, people who wear no seven-league boots- have no intellectual stride. These friends may be de- pended upon to give this organization a name. They will call it Jacob the supplanter, or Joseph the dreamer, or Ephraim the unturned cake, or Jeshurun the kicker, or some other interesting thing.
But Jacob the supplanter it cannot be. Let no man despise the tuition and institution of past days. We remember that these have made us what we are. The old tuition gave the world the mighty movements epito-
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mized in the names of Carey, Moody, Williams, Asa Bullard, William Booth, Frances Willard, and Francis Clark. It dotted the frontiers with Sunday schools which later grew to churches, it plowed the seas with mission ships, it planted the cross in farthest lands, and saturated and sanctified the soil with the blood of martyr- dom. We cannot hope to distance such achievements. They are the wonder-working of God in spite of imperfect agencies. We can only hope to furnish a better instru- ment. We seek to present a new bottle for the new wine of truth crushed from the vintage of God's dual word- the history of providence and the providence of history.
Again : I am impressed that this is not so much an organization as a movement. It may be styled impracti- cal because it does not furnish a perfect fit for all the particular exigencies which will arise to the end of the . chapter. It will be stigmatized as immature, an un- turned cake. Let us be profoundly thankful that this is so. There is room left for development. Ready-made garments never exactly fit, whether a shoe for the foot which advances, a glove for the hand which achieves, or a hat for the brain which thinks. And we may expect that the stretcher and the soapstone will need to be in evidence before this idea will fit to everything. John Locke sent a ready-made government by ship to Caro- lina, but it did not fit. It took Plymouth, and Boston, and the House of Burgesses, and Philadelphia, and Meck- lenburg, together with Lexington, and Yorktown, and King's Mountain, before the stars and stripes were per- mitted unvexed to beautify these western heavens. I am impressed with the thought that we are not today fram- ing a perpetual constitution, but writing a declaration of independence from old traditions. If our cake is but half-baked we can turn it over and cook it on the other side. The constitution with its particulars and amend- ments will come later, but we may say with Franklin,
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that the emblem on our speaker's chair is of a "rising and not a setting sun."
In other words, this is the inauguration of a new day. I do not believe that it will be a day of nonsense. This Convention is not an idle dreamer's toy. This under- taking is not for the exploiting of any fad, not even so attractive a fad as the impossible uniformity of denomi- nations in name and creed and polity and purse. This is not a movement to change the name of Paul to Peter, nor to make David sit down with a new song entitled Lamentations, nor to invite Jeremiah to join the Salva- tion Army. There are even better things than that. We are after something which could never come out of a single school of thought, but will come out of this voluntary confederation of great free-hearted servants of the truth, from all the religious territories, who are so enamored of the cause that they have forgotten for the time the color of their denominational stripes-and that something which this movement will achieve is not uniformity, but unity, the answered prayer of Jesus Christ.
I exult in this awakening because it promises an era of common sense in biblical and ethical tuition all along the line. The day is dawning when the Noah's ark excursioning of our Sunday schools across the surface of revelation, leaving us too often stuck on some inconse- quential Ararat, will be exchanged for humble walks with the truth of God sown on solid ground, through pastures, by streams, and upon the tops of perspective hills ; a day when the jigsaw treatment of the Scripture, which fills our secular and religious press with so much of foolish lesson commentary, will be displaced by the work of hewers on the Lebanon of God's word, shaping noble timbers for the temple of belief, while the jigsaw man retires to the woodshed where he belongs; a day when the limp-back Bible with its geometrical red lines, its apocalyptic art gallery, and its topography of
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heaven, will give place to a stiff-back Bible-stiff with accuracy and sanity and practicality; a new day when the crass literalism which makes an even valuation of every word in King James's version will vanish, and we shall no longer choose pious and fraternal watchwords for great religious movements from the lips of Jacob and Laban who mutually agree that God shall be the umpire to watch over them lest they do some cheating while they are "absent one from the other." In fine, we hail this enterprise as a means of declaring the height and depth and length and breadth of that revelation from on high-a revelation tall enough for an angel standing in the sun ; deep enough for the spirits shut in prison ; long enough to suit the timeless beatitude and golden rule and universal prayer; broad enough for the activities, the prob- lems, the conscience, the reason, and the destiny of mankind.
PROFESSOR GEORGE W. PEASE,
HARTFORD SCHOOL OF RELIGIOUS PEDAGOGY, HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT
It has been evident for some time that there existed a real need for a new national religious organization, planned on broad lines and definitely committed to the scientific spirit and method in dealing with the problems of religious education. I therefore hail this new move- ment, of which this Convention is the first organized evi- dence, as one of remarkable promise. The conditions are unusually favorable for the success of such a move- ment, for there is a widespread and growing desire on the part of a large minority of those engaged in the work for something better in the way of ethical and religious instruction and training for the children and youth of our land than is at present available even in the best Bible schools, the Young Men's Christian Associations, the public schools, and other organizations that provide for such instruction.
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But if the proposed organization is fully to accomplish its possible educational mission, its scope must be broad enough to bring it into relationship with all existing organizations and agencies that do educational work, and with those that may be born in the future -for in this age of organization some new scheme of co-operative effort is liable at any time to be presented to a long-suffer- ing public -that those organizations and agencies that are already struggling with the problems of religious educa- tion may be inspired and helped, and that all others may be led to incorporate into their work the religious element, for education without the distinctively ethical and reli- gious elements is hopelessly incomplete, and even, to an extent, dangerous.
In the address to which we have just listened, among the many educational agencies there enumerated with which the new organization must come into close and helpful relations, there are three that define themselves somewhat sharply in my mind as of special importance at the present time, namely: the home, the Bible school, and the theological seminary; and of these three I desire to speak more particularly of the Bible school, an agency for religious education in which I am deeply interested, and to indicate, very briefly, one purpose which the new organization should clearly set before itself and to which it should for all time tenaciously hold.
If we study carefully the Bible school in an attempt to answer the question, "What makes the Bible school a success or a failure ?" I think we shall find our answer, in the last analysis, in one word, the teacher. The teacher, the average teacher of the average school, is undoubtedly, as described last Tuesday evening, of limited knowledge of the art of teaching, but with an unbounded fidelity to the trust imposed upon him, with a seemingly irrepressible enthusiasm for the cause which has sustained him in the past and spurred him to render for these many years a
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voluntary service to the church, the results of which can never be measured or weighed by material standards; and with a wonderful consecration of self to a task which in many cases is a thankless one, and to a work con- sidered by many educators as beneath their notice and only spoken of with a covert sneer. The Bible-school teachers, in the face of such indifference, and even of hostile criticism from those who should have been their friends and guides, have persevered in their work and have accomplished much-not because they were expert teachers, for they were not, but because they were edu- cators in the sense that they caused the spiritual life in their pupils to germinate, to flower, and to produce the fruitage of Christian character.
The teacher of the Bible school is today one of the strategic points, if not the strategic point, in the present situation. He has done well, though working largely without the help that might have been given to him, and that should have been given to him. And I believe that it will be the purpose of this new organization to give to him in the near future this needed and possible help.
One needs at times the perspective that distance gives to see things in their right relations and right propor- tions. The French commissioner of education sent over by his government at the time of our Columbian Exposi- tion reported to his government upon his return that one of the greatest moral forces in the United States was the American system of Sunday schools; this is in reality a tribute to the faithful and earnest, though often unskilled, teacher.
But the future holds larger and better things in store for us than were ever dreamed of in the past, and that these larger and better things may be realized in the lives of the generation that is growing up before us, we need not only the earnest, consecrated teacher, but the teacher with an adequate conception of the character and
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the importance of his work, and with some training for his difficult task. The new organization must not only inspire the teacher to increased activity through the presentation of high ideals, but must supply that which at present is lacking-strong, definite, inspiring leader- ship, and not leave him to work out his own salvation in fear and trembling. It will not do for the proposed organization to stand above the teacher and simply approve or disapprove the work he does, but it must furnish him with guiding principles for his work which shall stimulate him to undertake larger and better things.
What then shall be the purpose of the new organiza- tion with reference to the Bible-school teacher?
I. The Bible-school teacher should be helped to secure a proper equipment for his work. While it might not be wise for this new Association to prepare any course of study for teachers, a committee on teacher equipment could be appointed whose duties would be to arouse a greater interest among the teachers in their work ; to suggest, possibly, various reading courses suit- able for teachers in the several departments of Bible- school work; to co-operate with summer schools, Chau- tauqua assemblies, and teachers' institutes where instruc- tion in the principles and methods of religious education is given; and in every way possible to seek to meet the present need for a larger body of well-equipped teachers.
2. The Bible-school teacher should be helped in his study of the lessons which he is to present from Sunday to Sunday, and in this direction a committee on reference literature could render very efficient and much-needed aid. The wide-awake, progressive teacher wants something more than is given him in the average lesson-help, and such a committee, by preparing carefully annotated lists of the most helpful books on the subjects of Bible study and religious education, with somewhat longer reviews of
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the more important ones, would meet a real need and do much to advance the cause of better religious instruction.
3. The Bible-school teacher needs today a better curriculum. While it is true that a good teacher will do creditable work with a poor lesson system, and while a poor teacher will fail even with a good system, it is also true that a good teacher will do the best work with a properly prepared series of lessons.
There is a growing dissatisfaction with the present uniform system of lessons, and the demand for a graded series is becoming more wide-spread and insistent. While I do not believe it should be the purpose of this new organization-for the present at least-to attempt the preparation of such a graded series, it might under- take a study of the whole question, and as a result of such study indicate the principles which should govern in the preparation of a pedagogic course of study for the Bible school, the subject-matter to be included in such, and the methods of presentation best calculated to pro- duce the desired results. To such a committee on curricu- lum might also be assigned the questions of text-books and published courses of study, they to furnish from time to time critical opinions of the value of such from the standpoint of modern thought. This procedure would stimulate and guide those who are at work on Bible-school curricula and hasten the time when the teacher would be provided with a graded series of lessons.
4. The Bible-school teacher in the average school needs a better environment in which to work. Many of our schools are poorly organized and badly managed, and as a result the teacher is compelled to work in an envi- ronment which interferes seriously with his efforts. Pastors and superintendents realize the unfortunate con- ditions existing, and are searching for those forms of organization and methods of administration that shall give the proper teaching environment and make their
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schools schools in fact as well as in name. A committee having in charge the questions that center about organ- ization and administration could at this time render very efficient help.
In these four ways some of the more urgent needs of the teacher could be met and a greatly needed service rendered, with immediate and permanent results.
REV. ALBERT E. DUNNING, D.D., EDITOR " THE CONGREGATIONALIST," BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
The mechanism of this proposed organization has been forecast in the address to which we have listened this morning. The spirit of it has been manifested, to the grateful satisfaction of those who hope for the grow- ing unity of Christians. God has made a revelation of himself and of his will here as clearly as ever he has done through an assembly of his children, and the record of it will abide.
But the language in which the revelation has been made, and in which its bearings on human conduct and on society have been discussed, will be new to a vast multitude of people to whom we wish the message to come as a divine inspiration. I have attended Sunday- school conventions of every sort for more than a score of years. I have not heard in any of them a loftier strain of Christian faith, nor felt a deeper sense of a great mission to men, than I have heard and felt here. But the form of expression is that of a new era.
That religion is not a separate or separable portion of education, but that in its truest sense education is reli- gion ; that the child has in him by inheritance the prin- ciple of life of his Father, and that the law of growth is to be known and used to bring him into the likeness of his Father, in whose image he was begotten; that the end of education is the making of the man what it is in him to become and what he ought to become; that the
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oracles of God are to be interpreted in accordance with our knowledge of those who uttered them, of those to whom they were uttered, and of their environment- these and other things familiarly spoken of here are as yet outside the range of thought of some millions of our fellow-countrymen.
To translate these truths into the vernacular, to do this work patiently, prayerfully, joyfully, conscious that it is a task worthy of the highest and most cultivated powers, is the work before this projected Association. This movement cannot be theological or sectarian. It must appeal for co-operation to the religious sense in men, to the sense of personal responsibility to God, to the necessity for worthy standards of righteousness essential to peaceful social and civic life, to national progress, and to the fulfilment of human ideals. We need to enlist all classes, teachers and pupils, parents and children, pastors and congregations, as well as authors, editors, and legislators. Our appeal is to every- one who would set a divine ideal before himself and his fellow-men.
The Sunday school is one, and but one, of the schools of religion. The home is another not less important. These are schools without the curricula or discipline of schools. We can no more limit religious teaching to trained teachers than we can limit parent- hood to men and women who have graduated as kinder- gartners or as trained nurses. Our business must be carried on by taking the untrained, though not unconse- crated, into partnership to train the coming generation.
The Bible is the supreme, but not the only, text- book. God is revealing himself now, always has been revealing himself; and the record of his revelation, wherever it is found, is the legitimate record to study. Our work is to show how the historic facts of religion and its abiding principles are to be taught to all sorts
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and conditions of men-to the unfolding mind and sen- sitive spirit of the child, to the expanding life of the youth, and to the mature mind.
No opportunity is given me here to suggest methods for doing this great service. But multitudes of earnest souls are looking to this organization to set them to work, and to tell them how to work more effectively than they are now doing. This cannot be done by a convention. It must be done by committees so con- stituted as to work together and to cover the whole field. Some practical direction should be given soon, which the people can understand, and can put into practice.
And under the guidance of God we may confidently expect the co-operation of the great majority of the churches and of our fellow-citizens of every name in the splendid task of guiding the religious education of the rising generation of the American people.
INFORMAL DISCUSSION
M. C. HAZARD, PH.D., EDITOR CONGREGATIONAL SUNDAY SCHOOL PUBLICATIONS, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
One of the wisest utterances that I know of in rela- tion to such a meeting as this was the one concerning the scope of the Convention as outlined in the circular that reached us who were to come here. This is paral- leled by the utterances of President Harper in his paper this morning. Progress is assured, and no one feels any more gratified at that than do I. But there have been some pessimistic utterances concerning things as they now are, and I wish for a moment to speak in relation to them. A physician who succeeds very carefully diagnoses the disease before he prescribes for his patient. He does not make out the disease to be worse than it is - unless he wishes to prolong his visits for the sake of his fees.
We are here a convention of doctors. You will understand the allusion when I say that in this Conven- tion with a stone you could more easily hit a doctor than a man. The principal patient that we have here before us is the Sunday school, and from some of the utterances you would suppose that the condition of the patient is worse than it is. Now, according to what has been said by some, it should present a peculiarly helpless and anæmic condition ; but, instead, it exhibits an inappropriate amount of vigorous activity. There is a good deal to be hoped for still from the Sunday school as it is, and it is because there is a great deal to be hoped from it that we can be assured somewhat of the future. But those who expect that by the introduction of a new system of les- sons there will be a great change, an immediate change,
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