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staff of Teachers College and other local educators; and the head of the College Department of Biblical Literature is the chairman. A lady has been appointed always for head of the Visiting Committee.

The teachers are men and women secured from among the instructors and students at the College and teachers of Speyer School. The acting-superintendent, or principal, the past winter has been an officer and graduate student of the College. The principal and teachers are paid something for their services, in order that the management, by means of sustaining a business relation with the teachers, may be free at any time to terminate the connection of any of them with the School. The supervisors and other committee-men give their services free. The pupils pay tuition. Scholarships have been provided for others, by means of subscriptions made by one or two of the special friends of the enterprise.

Thus the Sunday school sustains a vital relation with Teachers College, but has no official connection with it whatever. No Sunday school has grown more naturally. None is more truly an offspring of the home nor more directly home-controlled. The School has the university atmosphere desired, and the University has a Sunday school laboratory. For, from the first, the School, as its name implies, has been the needed observation school for the College courses in Sunday school instruction.

By the fourth year the enrolment of the School has reached one hundred pupils and the classes number ten. The annual session of the School is from the middle of October to the middle of May. The classes of high school grade meet their teachers from 9:30 to 10:30 o'clock. This permits these pupils to attend a church service at 11 o'clock. The classes of elementary grade meet at 10:30 o'clock for worship, and have an hour thereafter for classroom work. These hours are determined by a direct vote of the parents.

The College Chapel serves as the place of worship. It has an organ and is distinctly ecclesiastical in architecture. College classrooms are used for class instruction. They are furnished with writing-chairs, tables, blackboards, sand-tables and maps as desired. The kindergarten classes use the kindergarten room of the building. At times in good weather some of the younger classes have met out of doors. Occasionally classes visit hos

pitals to bear flowers, pictures or toys to sick children and otherwise cheer and amuse them. Some visits have been made to city missions for children. Also classes have been taken on Saturday excursions to inspect places of interest and instruction.

The course of study is principally biblical. It embraces also biographical studies of great workers of Christian times and masterpieces of modern literature. This curriculum is in print in essentially the form adopted. The period devoted to worship is employed in formal worship and expositions of its material purpose and character. Self-expression methods of instruction are pursued in classroom work, including map-making, oral and written narration and occasional more or less informal dramatizations of simple Bible stories. No written examinations or other intellectual tests as such are employed. Promotions are made from grade to grade as a matter of course, on the principle of general maturity.

The supervisors meet the teachers by groups and individually. The latter submit outlines of their instruction for the year and sample lesson plans. Students pursuing the College course in Sunday school instruction make critical written reports of their observation of the work of the School. Last winter an Observation Class was organized by graduate students of the College. They spent Sunday mornings for several weeks at the School, first in observing the work of some class and then in discussing the same and an assigned topic of religious education. Members of the Class were delegated also to make reports upon the work of the more progressive Sunday schools of the city.

The School has visitors every Sunday, including parents and friends of the pupils and Sunday school teachers of the city and from a distance.

As far as all educational effort is experiment this Sunday school is experimental. It has not attained but is attaining. Scarcely enough has been done even yet to venture upon publishing conclusions regarding ways and means of religious instruction. The immediate results of the School and its work upon its pupils, however, are apparent to any visitor. Obviously they defy description. It is enough to record probably that the children and their parents are more than pleased and that a demand is manifest for an adult class which may enjoy the same type of teaching.

in Japan

GALEN M. FISHER, M. A.

National Secretary, The Young Men's Christian Association of Japan, Tokyo, Japan

Japanese education before the restoration of 1868 was strongly ethical and religious. Ethical works were considered most worthy the attention of serious men. But in recent years the old classics have been read less and less, and although a good deal of ethics has been taught, the lack of faith on the part of pupils and of sincerity on the part of teachers has robbed it of much of its power. The chief authority of the teacher of ethics in the government schools is the Imperial Rescript on Education, which was issued fifteen years ago. It is a document of less than a page of an ordinary book, composed of Shinto and Confucian elements, exhorting subjects to loyalty toward their sovereign and to faithfulness toward their fellow countrymen and to readiness to sacrifice for the public good, and all for the sake of shedding still greater luster upon the eternal Imperial House and upon all ancestors. The teaching which is based upon this rescript naturally tends to bolster up the doctrine of the semidivine nature of the Imperial House and of ancestors. This is, of course, done for patriotic and political reasons by not a few publicists and teachers, who themselves hold the doctrine with large reservations.

On the other hand, leading teachers are trying to put ethics on the purely utilitarian or narrowly rational basis, divorcing ethics entirely from religious sanctions. The result is that many young students are in distress, having been forced to distrust the old religions and being given nothing but stones for bread. This has given rise to widespread despondency and bewilderment. Only a few days ago the minister of education, Mr. Makino, the late minister to Austria, a serious-minded man, issued a special order, calling attention to the present unrest and immorality among students and urging teachers and parents to discourage such tendencies by every means in their power. One result of this present state of mind is an eagerness to grasp at any straw of hope. This has led to a remarkable popularity for the doctrines of Nietzsche and for mysticism, but their vogue is passing, for they have failed to satisfy men's cravings.

To aggravate the situation, the former reverence for teachers and for the authority of the classics has weakened, and with it the distinctive virtues of the educated man in former times-humility, gentleness, truthfulness and deference to authority, have noticeably declined. The inrush of modern civilization, with the accompanying study of science, economics and the work of Mill, Bentham, Huxley and Spencer, has given rise to liberalism in politics, utilitarianism in ethics, and irreverence or indifference toward religion. The slogans of the day are, accordingly, natural law, imperial expansion and trade. Financial success is a word to conjure with, and money-making without either the old contempt for wealth or the altruism of Christian faith is one of the greatest menaces of modern Japan.

The one ethical aim in which modern education is splendidly successful is in the cultivation of patriotism. The steady policy of the past thirty years has been to make every school boy and girl a fervent patriot. Readers, histories, songs, ceremonies, drills and excursions to famous places, have all been intended to kindle patriotism. The policy has succeeded. We must grant that patriotism has ethical and religious value, for it demands co-operation, sacrifice, a measure of brotherly sympathy and devotion to an invisible, unselfish object. The late war, by its exaltation of patriotism, no doubt strengthened these qualities in the hearts of the people. The loyalty felt toward the Imperial house, and the worship of ancestors also have some religious value by supplying supra-mundane sanctions for conduct. But patriotism and loyalty and filial piety are all lacking in some of the essential qualities of a religion that shall satisfy intelligent men, such as universality, and the conception of a supreme Person who seeks to win men by love and calls forth an answering love for Him and for all fellow-men.

But apart from the patriotic cult, a strong ally in meeting the religious needs of modern Japanese is the revival of some of the best features of old Japanese ethics in the shape of Bushido, the code of Japanese knighthood. For although the classics themselves are so little read, Bushido embodies much of their teaching. Present-day Bushido is an attempt to perpetuate the teachings of medieval Japanese Confucian teaching and the spirit of the Japanese knight. Naturally, bereft of its old trellis, feudalism, modern Bushidō cannot be an exact reproduction of the old

code, and it is better so, for original Bushidō was lacking in the chivalrous attitude toward women and in a high regard for the value of human life. The modern classic on Bushido is by Dr. I. Nitobe, but Dr. Nitobe is himself an earnest Christian, and he has softened and supplemented the old teaching by the spirit and teaching of Christ. So that while Bushido is exerting a powerful and generally wholesome influence its revival is due in no small degree to those who have fallen under the spell of Christianity. What all friends of Japan must wish is to see such sages and heroes as Fujwara Shōkwa, Nakae Tõju, Kumazawa Bansan, Muro Kyusō, Ninomiya Sontoku, Hideyoshi, Sakura Sōgoro, Saigō Takamori and Yokoi Shōnan kept from being buried under the avalanche of present-day irreligion, irreverence and commercialism, for in them is the finest embodiment of the higher ethics of old Japan. Although some of them disavowed belief in any religion, yet they were controlled by religious ideals. A creed that could make such characters is wofully needed in modern life.

Bushido, however, by itself is admittedly inadequate to modern demands. It is only indirectly religious. It must be supplemented by the Christian reverence for women, by a high appreciation of the sacredness of human life of whatever rank or race, and by a universal and eternal object of loyalty in a personal, holy, divine Father. It should be the last purpose, however, of the Christian, not less than of the Japanese patriot, to uproot and throw away this valuable indigenous growth. For Bushido exemplifies a number of Christian virtues and enforces them by characters and teachings peculiar to Japan. While all the distinctive virtues of Bushido are latent, if not active, in Christianity, yet Christianity as so far embodied in the West, has often slighted such virtues of Bushido as reverence for the past and for the family line, masculine gentleness, stoical obedience to duty and to superiors, and contempt for ease and wealth. These are some of the offerings of Japanese Bushido to a rounded interpretation of Christianity. It is such principles as these that are struggling for survival amidst the decadence of Buddhism and Shinto and the increasing materialization of modern life and education.

Confusianism, in the chalice of Bushido, has held its potency through the centuries in Japan, even among modern educated men, whereas Chinese students, like those in Tokyo to-day, are

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