which has received a great deal of comment at the hands of writers and teacher leaders in the field of religious education within the Church. It is hardly necessary to enter into details, but every article of belief should be thoroughly ventilated, interpreted, held up for examination, and illustrated. To give an example or two, it will be found that the idea of God among children is almost uniformly anthropomorphic, i. e., God is presented as though He is a very powerful and holy man. This idea should, of course, be broken down. Forgiveness of Sins needs a great deal of clearing up, especially in a communion in which the power of administering forgiveness of sins is specifically a part of the duties of the priesthood. The historic reason for the inclusion of the clause, " Suffered under Pontius Pilate," should be fully explained. These vital matters will remain in children's minds long after the Kings of Israel have evaporated in the thin mists of mature forgetfulness.

Children take naturally to learning verse and rhythmic statements. The great hymns of the Church should always be used at least for children beyond kindergarten age. There are enough great hymns full of churchly teaching to occupy the musical attention of a Sunday School director for a number of years without wasting time over the puny substitutes which form the musical staple in many schools. If you ever want to have your congregation take active part in a sung Eucharist, begin with the children and teach them Merbecke's Communion Service. They will know it by heart, words and music, in a surprisingly short time, and these familiar points of contact with the communion office in their Prayer Books will remain with them throughout their lives.

The reason people find the Prayer Book hard to use is because they have never been taught to go by the rubrics. Rubrics are very generally ignored by all but the more intellectual and devout portions of a congregation, and almost universally by parsons in Sunday Schools. Children's attention should frequently be called to the rubrics and when this is done the reason for having rubrics at all in Prayer Books will be justified and the "difficulties" of following a service will disappear. Rubrics cannot be taught and mastered in a few weeks.

The general and specific duties of Churchmen should be thoroughly taught in the Sunday school. Such matters as the Canon on Church attendance (how many laymen including parish officers ever knew there was one?), the question of transfers, preparation before communion, and even meditation and the practices of devotion can be taught with surprising ease. All these things are commonly neglected, and the average child who has gone to Sunday School for eight years without missing more than a Sunday or two a year, ordinarily knows at graduation,- just nothing that is of any particular value to him as a Churchman. The things discussed and taught in the confirmation class constitute new material for most children who have spent years in Sunday School. Their interest in these new and strange doctrines is ordinarily much greater than had ever been aroused by the usual cut and dried Sunday School curriculum. Most if not all the usual material forcibly injected into the minds of confirmation candidates should have been digested long before in the Sunday School, thus affording to the pastor the greatest opportunity he can have of spending his time in confirmation preparation with that large proportion of his classes derived from the Sunday School in purely devotional talks, using rather than teaching the material already learned therein.

Marjorie Pope, the heroine of H. G. Wells' tale, "Marriage," sat in the railway carriage and thought over things, among them, religious matters. She couldn't decide just what it was that the Church constantly taught her she should want to be saved from! Probably ninety-nine per cent of our Sunday school children, if they ever thought of this problem, could not decide it. The material presented to their minds in Sunday School is so vague that it is no wonder they are not equipped to state and meet spiritual problems. If Marjorie had had a rector (or was it a vicar?) who had taken the trouble to make clear to her what the Church teaches in the name of God about the Forgiveness of Sins, she would have known very well, and in all human probability she would have possessed a lively desire to be saved.

A really considerable number of people in the Church have a very vague and inadequate idea of our characteristic sacramental system. Here again is a central matter for instruction material in the Sunday school. It is an excellent plan every once in a while to arrange to have baptisms take place at the Sunday School hour, the children acting as the receiving congregation.

Reverence can be taught in Sunday School. This is especially easy in case the main school meets in the Church, but instruction in proper conduct in Church should certainly have a place in any Church school's curriculum. The names and uses of all the articles of Church furniture could be learned by all the pupils, beginning with the altar as the central thing around which the rest of the Church is built. At the very least, children should be painstakingly taught to reverence the altar when they enter and leave Church. Here the example of well trained servers comes strongly to the fore. It is almost always better to have older boys or young men serve you at the children's Eucharist at the Sunday School hour than to allow boys of Sunday School age to serve. A selection of the best singers in the Sunday School from among the older children might be made into a loosely organized Sunday School choir. When this is possible, it is a great help in teaching the younger children the musical setting to the communion service. Girls will probably do this best. If you have no boy choir, using boys in the Sunday School choir may be the opening wedge for a boy choir later on. It will be found more practicable to have this Sunday School choir recruited either from boys entirely or girls entirely. Combining the two sexes in a choir made up of children of Sunday School age can hardly be done without risking the breaking out of the boys' tendency to show off and that of the girls to giggle and fuss which is bad enough at any service, but positively ruinous at a children's Eucharist.

Getting as many children as possible into your Sunday School is a good policy which I do not need to publish or defend. Most sectarian Sunday Schools pursue this policy and the result is

2" Good Manners in Church; for Children and Others," The author, Young Churchman Co. (a tract or leaflet. In press.)

sometimes a kind of scrambling competition which is at least undignified. The current sectarian policy of "making the school attractive" may be very well in schools where almost anything but the central things we want to teach can be taught, but we do well to avoid most of the "attractive" schemes. There is one best way to carry out this extensive side of your Sunday School work. That is, to include and emphasize in your intensive work the missionary idea. Even children of tender years can be made to realize the glory of the Church and the Christian Religion, and it is well to foster their interest in the sharing of this privilege with others. I do not wish to intrude upon the field of the seminary instructor in charge of the course leading towards the canonical examination in "the principles and methods of Religious Education, especially as applied to the Sunday-school," but I want to urge that while extensive work is not to be neglected, it be not made to occupy the chief place in the scheme of direction in your Sunday School. There is almost everywhere a field for the legitimate operation of extension plans, among the children in the community who go nowhere. A large number of these will be the children of the poor and diffident, and the greatest care must be taken, for these children are tender plants, worth nursing, to make them feel welcome and "at home" in your school. Here again you will do your best work through your children who already belong. In every way that your personality permits, emphasize the unchristian villiany of looking askance at ill-dressed children. Make your Sunday School children see that they have here a great opportunity for "social service work." They must be taught to regard it as one of the chief privileges of those who have, to extend kindness, especially personal sweetness, to those who have not.

Many Sunday Schools have a considerable "floating membership of children who come regularly for a few Sundays, and then quit, or of children who come, on an average, once every two months. If you have such a group in your school, do your best, of course, to win and keep them by every means in your power, but if you manage properly you need

not have this group a very considerable one. I suspect that in Sunday schools where competitions for new members, and all that kind of thing is carried on, this problem is more generally present than in others which pursue more dignified and effective methods based on creating a "tone" in the school which makes the desire to increase the membership a salient characteristic.

In many communities having rural suburbs, as in the parts of a township outside city limits, the wise tendency to centralization in a few good schools has replaced the older idea of having a comparatively poor district school in every section where a dozen children can be mustered, with one teacher for all the grades. Hence, the "school bus," which brings outlying children into the central schools, the expense of which in money and educational results is happily less than the maintenance of many small schoolhouses. Very often this bus can be engaged for a small sum to bring the children who ride in it every day to school, to school on Sundays. Ordinarily the bus and horses are owned by a farmer who is paid to carry the school children, and the business proposition can be made to him direct. Usually, too, in these days, the families of those children have little or no sense of allegiance to any Church, but are willing to let you have their children. Sometimes they will even pay for the bus. I think it is a mistake to be content to teach these children any little scraps of things connected in a loose, general way with religion. If you" carry the Church to them," it will not be so easy to make good Churchmen out of them as it will when you " carry them to the Church," in the school bus. I would be loath to deprecate the rudiments of rural work which are just beginning to emerge in our Church life, but in this particular case, don't leave any children, who can, by any possible means, be brought to the parish Church every Sunday, to the " once a month" Sunday School held by your local Rural Missionary. He hasn't the facilities that you have or your equipment. The" Once a month " Sunday School in the backwoods district two miles away from your parish Church may give these children their own ideas of God and religion, but it probably will not make them regular