drama. Everything, however, has a distinct moral lesson, although that lesson is
not made offensively prominent. We have here nearly a score of these textbooks,
large and small. It would seen as though the resources of the French records and
literature had been ransacked, and indeed many deeds of heroism are culled from
the daily press. The matter is often arranged under headings such as cleanliness,
acts of kindness, courage, truthfulness versus lying, respect for age, good
manners, etc. Each virtue is thus taught in a way appropriate to each stage of
childhood, and quite often bands of mercy, rescue leagues and other societies are
the outgrowth of this instruction. It is, of course, exposed to much criticism from
the clergy on the cogent ground that morality needs the support of religion, at the
very least, in childhood. This system has had much influence in England where
several similar courses have been evolved, and in this country we have at least
one very praiseworthy effort in this direction, addressed mainly, however, to
older children.
Besides this, two ways suggest themselves. First, we may try to assume, or
tediously enucleate a consensus of religious truth as a basis of will training, e.g.,
God and immortality, and, ignoring the minority who doubt these, vote them into
the public school. Pedagogy need have nothing whatever to say respecting the
absolute truth or falsity of these ideas, but there is little doubt that they have an
influence on the will, at a certain stage of average development, greater and
more essential than any other; so great that even were their vitality to decay like
the faith in the Greek or German mythology, we should still have to teach God
and a future life as the most imperative of all hypotheses in a field where, as in
morals, nothing is so practical as a good theory; and we should have to fall to
teaching the Bible as a moral classic, and cultivate a critical sympathy for its
view of life. But this way ignores revelation and supernatural claims, while some
have other objections to emancipating or "rescuing" the Bible from theology just
yet. Indeed, the problem how to teach anything that the mind could not have
found out for itself, but that had to be revealed, has not been solved by modern
pedagogy, which, since Pestalozzi, has been more and more devoted to natural
and developing methods. The latter teaches that there must not be too much seed
sown, too much or too high precept, or too much iteration, and that, in Jean
Paul's phrase, the hammer must not rest on bell, but only tap and rebound, to
bring out a clear tone. Again, a consensus of this content would either have to be
carefully defined and would be too generic and abstract for school uses, or else
differences of interpretation, which so pervade and are modified by character,
culture, temperament, and feeling, would make the consensus itself nugatory.
Religious training must be specific at first, and, omitting qualifications, the more