The Bible, the great instrument in the education of conscience, is far less
juvenile than it is now the fashion to suppose. At the very least, it expresses the
result of the ripest human experience, the noblest traditions of humanity. Old
Testament history, even more than most very ancient history, is distilled to an
almost purely ethical content. For centuries Scripture was withheld from the
masses for the same reason that Plato refused at first to put his thoughts into
writing, because it would be sure to be misunderstood by very many and lead to
that worst of errors and fanaticism caused by half-truths. Children should not
approach it too lightly.
The Old Testament, perhaps before or more than the New, is the Bible for
childhood. A good, protracted course of the law pedagogically prepares the way
for the apprehension of the Gospel. Then the study of the Old Testament should
begin with selected tales, told, as in the German schools, impressively, in the
teacher's language, but objectively, and without exegetical or hortatory
comment. The appeal is directly to the understanding only at first, but the moral
lesson is brought clearly and surely within the child's reach, but not personally
applied after the manner common with us.
Probably the most important changes for the educator to study are those which
begin between the ages of twelve and sixteen and are completed only some years
later, when the young adolescent receives from nature a new capital of energy
and altruistic feeling. It is physiological second birth, and success in life depends
upon the care and wisdom with which this new and final invoice of energy is
husbanded. These changes constitute a natural predisposition to a change of
heart, and may perhaps be called, in Kantian phrase, its schema. Even from the
psychophysic standpoint it is a correct instinct which has slowly led churches to
center so much of their cultus upon regeneration. In this I, of course, only assert
here the neurophysical side, which is everywhere present, even if everywhere
subordinate to the spiritual side. As everywhere, so here, too, the physical may
be called in a sense regulative rather than constitutive. It is therefore not
surprising that statistics show that far more conversions, proportionately, take
place during the adolescent period, which does not normally end before the age
of twenty-four or five, than during any other period of equal length. At this age
most churches confirm.
Before this age the child lives in the present, is normally selfish, deficient in
sympathy, but frank and confidential, obedient to authority, and without
affectation save the supreme affectation of childhood, viz., assuming the words,