(c) The appeal to make the decision should be individual, rather than collective. It is a question whether we have a right to make young people just entering their teens face the great alternative in a bunch. They need personal, face-to-face friendship and help.

"In one warmly evangelistic church, two years ago, one hundred and fifteen cards were signed. Of these, twenty have since joined the church. . . . Then there is the leakage, the waste, the possible alienation. When one hundred and fifteen signed, over three hundred refused to sign. Is it not possible that these three hundred believe that they have thus disowned Christ? It seemed a daring act, but the heavens did not fall nor the lightning strike; next year it becomes easier to refrain. Is it wholesome thus to lead young souls up to the great alternative and let the will fail, and do it year after year?"*

(3) The personal talk. Whether or not there is systematic catechetical instruction, the actual getting the pupil to decide depends almost always upon a personal word. The decision is individual, and the alternative must be presented to each pupil for himself. And it must be in private.

"It is a cowardly thing to say personal things and ask searching questions of a boy in the midst of his fellows which you would not dare to ask that boy privately in ordinary conversation. It is to protect these reserves thus rudely assaulted that a boy puts on with his Sunday suit a disguise which he carries to the hand-to-hand encounters of the Sunday school and junior society. The teaching which merely touches that artificial boyhood will be easily slipped off when the disguise is removed Sunday evening and the boy goes forth to the sport and freedom of Monday." t

It is undoubtedly harder to talk to one boy about religion than to * Forbush: "The Boy Problem," p. 124. Dr. Forbush's whole discussion of this matter is eminently sensible. "The appointing of a State Decision Day and tabulating the totals from the day smacks of loving children statistically. . . . As the years go by I confess a growing distaste for the noise, the rush and the tremor of great machinery, and a deeper desire in any natural way possible to know my boys and girls so well that I may help keep them safe until the time when that finest of all spiritual fruitages comes, as the one hundred and tenth Psalm so beautifully describes it:

"On holy mountains out of the lap of the dawn

The dew of Thy young soldiery offers itself to Thee.'"

Forbush: "The Boy Problem,” p. 180.

talk to ten; it takes more courage to ask personal questions in a private conversation than in a class discussion. But that is because they mean infinitely more. If you are really earnest about your work, you will at some time or other ask each of your pupils to decide this greatest of life's issues. It is a holy task, and you may well tremble before it. But to win a soul is the greatest thing that life can bring you. Did you ever notice the marginal reading of the great promise with which the book of Daniel ends? "The teachers," it says, "shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever."

Do not overdo. Do not ask your pupil too often, or too many personal questions. Life's deepest issues are too sacred to be talked of glibly. You may easily enough make yourself a bore and alienate the boy you would win, if you say too much about his soul. Be natural. Do not use "pious" phraseology. Talk to him directly, as friend to friend, and in the speech of common life. Pick your time carefully. Watch your opportunities. Do not fail unless you must. Every time that you put the alternative to a pupil and fail to win him, you make it easier for him to refuse again. "If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin."

4. After the decision we shall help the youth to carry it out in actual life and service, and so to come to the full maturity of spiritual manhood. Our special problem in these years is to meet the intellectual and practical needs of later adolescence. After expansion, concentration. Life's dream-time is past; now it faces reality. Shall religion be lost through disuse or doubt? Shall the decision of early adolescence melt away with other aspirations of those days of vision? Or shall it remain the very center of life as it concentrates its energies and acquires individuality?

We have already thought of the characteristics of later adolescence, and of its needs.* We need add little now. We then spoke of three great reconstructive forces-education, love and social service. These same three we must use as we seek to meet the religious needs of youth. We now understand them better, however. Let us reverse their order and enlarge their scope. Work, friendship and knowledge are the three great agencies of spiritual nurture in that critical period between deci. sion and full maturity-work, because the youth is intensely practical; friendship, because he is just taking his place in the great wide world; knowledge, because, a doubter and a creed-maker, he is forming those

*See Lesson VII.

ideas of life and the world about him that he will likely keep to the end of his days.

In all three the demand of the youth is for reality. The work you set for him must be real-something that the world needs, that someone must do or it will suffer lack. The friendship you give him must be genuine and whole-hearted, with no condescension or uneasy sense of an ulterior motive. The knowledge with which you seek to meet his doubts must be adequate and true, with no shifting of issues or falling back upon mere authority. Yet often enough the church and Sunday school have failed to meet this demand for reality. In place of knowledge, they have been heard to offer but the wearisome reiteration of texts. For friendship, there have sometimes been "calls" and "sociables"; for work, a self-centered ecclesiastical pottering about.

"Of the dozens of young women who have begged me to make a connection for them between their dreams of social usefulness and their actual living I recall one of the many whom I had sent back to her clergyman, returning with this remark: 'His only suggestion was that I should be responsible every Sunday for fresh flowers upon the altar. I did that when I was fifteen, and liked it then; but when you have come back from college and are twenty-two years old, it doesn't quite fit in with the vigorous efforts you have been told are necessary in order to make our social relations more Christian.'"'*

Happily, pastors of this sort are coming to be few. The church and Sunday school of our day are meeting the demand for reality. Intellectually, socially, practically-in knowledge, friendship and work -the Church of Jesus Christ is to-day stronger and more virile than ever before. Its mood is objective. It sees in itself an organization for work. It will be content with nothing less than social regeneration; and it means business. Every teacher should catch the vision of twentieth century Christianity, and make his own its intellectual vigor, its business methods and its concrete devotion to social ends. Teaching in this spirit, he will keep his pupils and lead them "from strength to strength," till " every one of them appeareth before God

in Zion."

*Addams: "The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets," p. 160.

QUESTIONS

1. What is the natural time for spiritual decision? Why?

2. Why should the act of will rather than an emotional experience or the intellectual possession of dogmas be made the condition of entrance upon full church membership?

3. How early in life may we begin to make ready for the decision? What are the chief agencies of spiritual nurture which we may employ?

4. Should the teacher make a practice of stating the moral and spiritual application of the lessons to the lives of his pupils, or should he let them make the application? Give reasons for your answer.

5. What authority should the teacher have for his teaching? What authority should he impress upon his pupils? Give reasons for this.

6. Compare direct with indirect suggestion as a means of applying the truth to the lives of pupils. Show how methods must differ in the various grades.

7. What factors contribute to the spiritual atmosphere of the Sunday school? Show how it may be made spiritually uplifting.

9. What should be the aim and character of worship in the Sunday school?

9. What can we do to use most effectively toward spiritual ends the power of personal influence?

10. How can the life of children in social service be made an agency of spiritual nurture?

II. What are the positive values of the confirmation class as a method of getting the young to accept God's love and enter His Church? 12. Discuss the objections to the catechetical method and the confirmation class.

13. Discuss the value of Decision Day as a method of securing spiritual decision.

14. Why is a personal talk or question nearly always needed to secure the pupil's decision to serve God? What cautions should the teacher bear in mind in undertaking this personal work?

15. Discuss the teacher's problem after his pupils have made the decision and entered into full church membership.

LESSON XXI

THE IDEAL TEACHER: JESUS

There remains to be said about our work the one thing that, more than all others, expresses its dignity and worth. It was Jesus' work. He, too, was a teacher. We stand, therefore, in a unique relation to Him. Other men, indeed, may do His will as completely as do we. On the farm and in the shop, behind the counter and at the office desk, men can and do follow Him. The life may be His, whatever its outward form. Its Way may be His, through whatever thickets of circumstance the path of duty may lie. But we, who have chosen to teach, follow directly in His footsteps. We make His own business ours. And so He is our Ideal, not only in the general sense in which we share His example with all humanity, but in the very particular form of His words and deeds. He is not only the Ideal Man; He is our Ideal Teacher.

We remember how, time and again throughout our study, when we sought a concrete example to illustrate the principle of teaching of which we were thinking at the moment, we went to Jesus' life. He was the Master Teacher of all time. No other could have taken a dozen unlearned countrymen, and in less than three years have so taught them that he could leave his own work in their hands. No other's teaching has been so naturally and immediately adapted to the particular situations he faced, and yet so universal in its truth and eternal in its appeal, unbound by time and place. Yes, it may be said, but that was because He was the Son of God. That is true. But it is just as true that Jesus' teaching had the wonderful power it had because He knew how to teach.

There is no space, in this brief lesson, to discuss Jesus' methods of teaching with even an approach to adequacy of treatment. And it is perhaps as well. Ideals are to be seen and followed, rather than talked about. What we need is not so much a description of Jesus' methods as a concrete acquaintance with them. We must study them for ourselves as they are recorded in the gospels, grasping not only the outward form but the inner spirit. There is no better training for a Sunday school teacher than a careful study of the life of Christ, from the point of view of His character as a teacher. This chapter aims only to present an outline for such a study.