ligion springs out of the fundamental instincts of the mind itself. The church is not a means of bringing religion from some outside source to the individual; it is rather the expression of a common religious experience. The rite of baptism, accordingly, must be regarded as a symbol of an inner transition of experience, a fully conscious giving up of self to the divine life. There is implied a development of will sufficient to enable the individual to understand the nature of the transition through which he is passing. Infant baptism belongs to the institutional or sacramental theory. The baptism of Jesus, symbolizing the personal consecration of his adolescent self to the kingdom of God is the ideal type of true baptism. To enter prematurely into the church is to be deprived of the real self-surrender which normally can come only at a later period. It tends to render the whole religious life a monotonous plateau with no mountain peaks of soul-stirring insight and personal readjustment. If there is any one thing on which psychology is agreed it is that things are understood only on the level of the child's development, and in the light of his actual experience. And this holds as truly for the religious phase of his experience as for any other. Danger of Uniformity. It must, however, be kept in mind that although the mind responds as a totality yet different phases of the mind predominate in different individuals. And this makes impossible in the pedagogy of religion any uniform or standard method. McKinley has admirably distinguished four temperaments which he calls the weak-motor, or sanguine, the strongmotor or energetic, the weak-sensory or phlegmatic, and the strong-sensory or reflective. The energetic and the phlegmatic, he thinks, are the most difficult, the sanguine and the reflective the least difficult, to reach. Women, he thinks, belong to the two types most easily reached: they are also more inclined by nature to self-sacrifice, are more racial and less individual, and hence more responsive to whatever methods are in vogue. It is his opinion, accordingly, that "as a rule religion must hold its own through the women; it must make its chief advances through the men." The Educational Method. There remains to consider the educational method of dealing with the religious life. This method must be fundamentally psychological. It rests upon the psychological fact that religion is an elemental attitude of the total human self toward what it instinctively feels to be a divine life. It looks upon nature as the manifestation of a divine life because it is instinctively compelled to interpret its world after the analogy of its own inner life. No one can escape this point of view save the philosophical materialist, and even in him there exists the same religious impulse. The educational method does not attempt to create religion, or to prove its credibility, but to train and develop an already existing impulse. From this point of view it would seem that the great desideratum in the present situation of religious education is a workable, pedagogical method of arranging the material to be taught in a graded system which shall provide material suitable to the changing and therefore different levels of the developing mind. The earliest strata of the mind are those of the play-instincts, habitformation, memory, etc. Later on obedience to moral and religious laws will be the center of education. Finally, at adolescence will come a new sense of self, a consciousness of independence, a feeling of self-initiative. This is the beginning of the secondbirth, a birth not of the body but of the soul. The attainment of this personal appreciation of the meaning of life is the absolute condition of all genuine morality and religion. The inner meaning of the world is now beginning to open before the growing soul. What is most needed is not a curriculum of hard and fast formulations according to which the adolescent mind is expected to model its own experience, but a Socratic method which shall furnish such a curriculum as shall draw out the developing soul of youth. In the early period when the new sense of self is nebulous and unformed, when the soul in its individual aspect is literally being born, there results a second childhood, not physical but mental, moral and spiritual. The development of this individual phase of experience marks a formative period, so that much ought to be made of unconscious imitation, suggestion and the formation of habits. In later adolescence, doctrines, the Bible, the life of Jesus, must be reinterpreted by each individual in the terms of his own experience as he faces life's problems for himself. The teaching of Jesus and his doctrine of the Kingdom of God is the ideal type of material for the adolescent, especially in its mature stage. The pre-adolescent youth must be taught to conform to the requirements of the objective world. The adolescent youth must work out through his own experience of self-discovery the principles of inner self-control, so that through his own self-gov ernment and self-direction he may personally co-operate with the objective world. The study of the Bible from this psychological point of view rests in no way on any pre-existent theory about it, any doctrine as to what it must or must not mean. Psychologically regarded, the Bible is the fragmentary record of the moral and religious development of a race. What its value is depends alone upon the value of the actual facts which it presents. To approach it from the standpoint of our own doctrines, which is the usual doctrinal method, is to take the facts out of their setting and rearrange them according to our own intellectual point of view. This is to use the Bible only as a store house from which to draw material for the exposition of our own views. The real way to study or teach the Bible, if one wishes to study or teach the Bible itself and not to set forth one's own private views, is to become familiar with the history of the Hebrew people and to interpret their literature as a partial expression of their actual life process. When once the truth is grasped that religion grows out of the nature of experience itself, that it has its roots in life, in living tendencies and feelings, and not in any theory whatever, it becomes clear that the relation of the life and teaching of Jesus to human experience remains absolutely unchanged by the historical method of Bible study. Its spiritual significance for experience must remain so long as his life and teaching adequately reveal man's nature in its relation to the divine life. The method of emphasizing some moral, which usually represents only a subjective attitude, or of extracting some doctrine and making this the central thing is again usually a reconstruction of the subject-matter according to an outside point of view. If we teach the actual facts we need not fear, if the material is properly selected, that these moral and spiritual elements will be absent. They can be taught as elements in the actual material itself. This will make them more, instead of less, effective. The normal mind is objective, not introspective, so that the isolation of the moral and spiritual elements from the total fact or situation will make them intangible and defeat its own end. In the actual world, in the world of poetry, history or religion, these elements are realized in definite events, embodied in actual persons; abstracted from their concrete setting, they are liable, except for those of philosopical turn of mind, to float in vacuo. The Sunday-School Hymn Tune CHARLES HUBERT FARNSWORTH Some years ago while conducting the music in a Sundayschool of a small western town I did what was my custom, asked the children to select a tune. It happened on this occasion that one of the children called for one of the liveliest Gospel tunes in the book. It was a tune that I had systematically shunned. I had been leading the music for four or five years, and selecting what I considered the best tunes. When I asked the children to select tunes, they would generally call for some that we had been singing. I had taken this as an indication of an improvement in their taste for music. You can imagine my surprise when this outlawed tune was called for. But my surprise was turned into discouragement as I noticed how the tune went. There was a color and fervor to the tone that showed the children were at home in this tune in a way they were not in the tunes that I was selecting for them. I remember feeling at the time that this represented something perverse in human nature, a sort of æsthetic sin which was easier to do than to leave undone. But the true reason was this: The two or three songs sung each Sunday morning were not sufficient to make those children thoroughly familiar with the style they represented. On the other hand, the jiggy and sentimental styles were those which the children were constantly experiencing in their everyday life. The songs, whether secular or sacred, sung around the cabinet organs in their homes were of these types; hence the music I was giving them in the Sunday school was to a large extent in an unfamiliar idiom. No wonder they did not have the tone-color and swing that the popular tunes had. The opportunity to hear the standard tunes of the church sung around the hearth fire which family worship at one time offered is gone. The day school offers but a scanty and perfunctory substitute for hearing such music. It is not a question of simply knowing the music. This can be easily taught, but what is more difficult, the music to serve a religious purpose must be of a character having religious associations. The two songs a week sung in my school, different in type from the songs heard in all other religious exercises attended by the children, were not sufficient to establish the proper associations. Even if the proper associations exist, the music may still be a failure. On the other hand, even without such help, the music may be very satisfactory. The reason for success or failure arises not so much from the music as from the condition of the assembly that is producing the music. There must be some latent enthusiasm, a consciousness of companionship, of interest in a common cause in the assembly if the music it produces is to be effective. The singing of a congregation might be compared to a condensing lens gathering the individual enthusiasm emitted by the members and focussing it into one emotional channel; the essential thing for success is that there be feeling to focus. If the members of an assembly have no enthusiasm to express, or, worse still, have a negative attitude, the attempt to sing together makes bad matters worse. The assembly immediately becomes conscious of the lack of unity and enthusiasm. The music has a depressing instead of a stimulating effect because of the way it is performed. This is not the fault of the music. To expect the music to originate the enthusiasm under such conditions is like expecting a man to lift himself by pulling on his boot straps. Take, for instance, two schools; one large and flourishing, with energetic managers and thoroughly awakened interest on the part of the children. The lively jiggy tunes go with a vim and life, with enthusiasm and snap. The principal will tell you that it is because they sing this kind of music that the singing is so effective. Compare with this another school, small, dead and alive, the managers not blest with the western hustle of the first one described but believing in singing the standard church tunes in the school. Here the music goes like the school. A superficial observer of these two schools would naturally infer: jiggy music-enthusiasm and effectiveness; good religious music-lifelessness and poor effect. Such an inference is not true; the difference between the singing of these two schools is the difference in their co-operative life. The music does not originate the enthusiasm of the first school, but expresses it and makes the school conscious of it. The lack of effect in the music of the lifeless school is not |