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Churchmen with a love for the parish Church cultivated by early associations therewith. If there is no bus nor other means of getting the outlying children into the Sunday School, then have your Sunday School children "take an interest" in the rustic school on the outskirts, and supply it with things that it needs, and visit it on occasions. Perhaps you may have one or two persons, raised under your own eye, who will be willing and able, to help the Missionary by going out there every Sunday and teaching that little school. This will give you the hold that you should have on those children, and the Missionary will be delighted with the arrangement. Extraordinary means of transportation should be provided, in any event, even at some expense, to bring those children into the parish Church (their parents will manage to get there too, perhaps) at Christmas and Easter, and perhaps on Whitsunday for the baptisms which are to be at the Sunday School hour and the joyful service which is to follow. By all means bring them in, too, when there is an episcopal visitation in your parish Church.

In the case of a small Sunday School in a community where for the time being suitable teachers are non-existent, it is sometimes an excellent plan to have a "catechetical school." Where circumstances are such, too, that any kind of proper grading of the pupils into classes must continue for a while as an unrealized ideal, the catechetical school is a great improvement over haphazard grouping. You can teach exactly what you please in such a school by the most direct of all methods.3

3 Thoroughly adequate catechizing is, of course, the work of a highly trained specialist. It requires a certain temperamental quality, which, like almost everything else, can be cultivated to a certain extent, and a great deal of the hardest kind of work to fit oneself for. Even on a small scale, this work, if undertaken at all, must be gone into so thoroughly that I do not venture even to suggest a book on the subject. Treatment of this subject falls without the scope of this essay, and the writer, who conducted a catechetical school for two years, does not feel himself competent to attempt such a treatment of the subject even if such a chapter were feasible.

In small schools where exact grading is difficult but where there are good teachers enough to break the school up into the usual classes, the lesson system of the Practical Publishing Company of Westfield, N. J., has a great deal to commend it. In a school of one hundred pupils, or thereabouts, and often in smaller schools, this system, combined with the children's Eucharist one Sunday in the month, is excellent. I will not take the time to commend it in detail; the children's Eucharist has been already spoken of, and the "Practical" course can be examined very easily by any Sunday School Superintendent who cares to look into it.

Henry S. Whitehead.

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The Value of the Crucifix

From the English Church Review

BJECTIONS have been made against the religious use of the crucifix on the ground that it represents a dead Christ, whereas the Christian faith is in a living Saviour. It represents what Christ was, and not what He is. He was crowned with thorns, but now we see Him crowned with glory and honour. Accordingly, it is considered by some to be most undesirable to fix upon Christ as dead an attention which ought to be exclusively concentrated on Christ as living.

This is no doubt a prevalent objection. It has been raised within the English Church as well as beyond it; raised at times by persons whose character or authority give added weight to their protests and their warnings. Such an objection has been recently raised in support of a Protestant attack on Catholic observances. It comes as a challenge to all who believe that the crucifix is of deep religious use; to all who have recently desired its erection; to all who have presented it to churches; and to all who have sanctioned its being set up within the precincts of our sanctuaries.

We seem, therefore, called upon by this challenge to explain how it is that while we respect the earnestness of the objectors we are totally unconvinced by their objection.

We are to consider, therefore, what it is that the crucifix represents.

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Now, in the first place, and beyond all question, we entirely agree that it is a representation of Death.

1. But if the crucifix is to be abolished because it is a representation of Christ's Death, this must mean that all representations of the Death of Christ are wrong. But if they are, then it is not only the crucifix which must disappear, but every picture of the Passion must be effaced. For the crucifix is only an equivalent in the art of sculpture to the picture of the

Passion in the art of painting. The crucifix and the picture differ in nothing else than the material in which their representation is made. They are representations of the same fact in two sister arts. It is true, of course, that some people object to the crucifix and approve the painting. But that is only an illustration of inconsistency. If the representation of the Death of Christ in painting, whether in books or on the walls, or in a stained glass window, is permissible, there can be no reason in the nature of things why that Death should not be also represented in sculpture. The objection to the crucifix because it calls attention to the dead Christ disappears if you sanction it as permissible in painting. Consistency demands either that both these methods be allowed, or else that both be forbidden.

2. But, further, it must be maintained that Christians have a right to reresent any fact recorded in the life of Christ. If the Gospels declare it, we have the right to reproduce it in any form we can; whether in words, or on canvas, or in metal or stone. The crucifix is a fact in Christ's experience; just as much a fact as any other. There are, of course, two sides to Christ's experience. There is the Man of Sorrows, and there is the Man enthroned. There is the Crucified, and there is the Glorified. There is the cross, and there is the crown. He was humiliated first, and He was afterwards exalted. By all means let us have representations of the risen Christ, the ascending Christ, the glorified Christ. But if justice is to be done to the facts of His experience, we must also have representations of the crucified Christ.

If we are to reject the crucifix because it is a representation of the dead Christ, we must logically reject the cross as well. No doubt people frequently defend the symbolism of the cross while rejecting that of the crucifix. They tell us that the empty cross suggests that Christ has left it, and that the death is past; whereas the crucifix implies that He is hanging on it still. They say that the empty cross testifies to a Christ alive for evermore, whereas the crucifix only shows a Christ either dead or dying; that the crucifix tells us of the death of shame, the cross of the life of glory.

This distinction has been often made. But the proof of the assertion has not reached us. In truth the distinction will not hold. For the cross is nothing else than the emblem of death. Empty or occupied, it is an instrument of execution. In itself there is no suggestion of life about it. It simply means that Jesus died. An empty cross has not in itself the slighest hint of Resurrection. It is the faith of the Christian which reads that meaning into it. But if you can, as of course you can, read glory and honour into the cross, so you can into the crucifix also, and just as convincingly. For the truth is that the crucifix no more represents to the believer a dead Christ as opposed to a living one than the cross does. Just as the believer's knowledge of the Resurrection reads life into the cross, so it does into the crucifix. No Christian can put the construction of mere death upon the crucifix; for the simple reason that it is his certain assurance that that bleeding Figure lives, and is enthroned in heaven. In deed, it is impossible for Christians not to contemplate the Passion in the light of the Resurrection. It is the Resurrection which gives the value either to cross or crucifix. The record of the Passion in the Gospel, the commemoration on Good Friday, the emblem of cross or crucifix, are all of them what they are to us simply because we know all the time, while we hear or gaze on them, that the Christ, Whose dying is represented, is not dead, but alive for evermore. In fact, if the crucifix signified nothing more than a dead Christ, a Christ Who died but did not rise and does not live, we should turn away from it in despair, not towards it in hope and faith; for there would be no Gospel in it. It would be the concentrated emblem of all hopelessness; the worst that the earth could show, because it was the destruction of the best. To value the symbolism of the cross at the expense of that of the crucifix seems altogether unsatisfactory, for after all the cross as an emblem is incomplete. In requires the Figure of the Crucified to be added either in material sustance or else by a devout imagination. If the Figure is not there, the believer must think it there. For the cross has its value in the Crucified.

It is in the human form of Christ that the emblem becomes complete. It is the crucified One upon the cross which corresponds with historic fact. And it is this which we have to reproduce whenever we want to realize our Lord's experience. This was certainly the view of the early centuries, as indeed, it must be of any devout Christian imagination which corresponds with the facts of history. St. Jerome says of a saintly woman: "Before the cross she threw herself down in adoration, as though she beheld the Lord hanging upon it." The Lord hanging upon it: that is the point. That is indispensable to complete the cross's meaning.

There is a special reason why the present century requires the crucifix. It is the desperate attempt of "Christian Scientists" to efface all thoughts of pain and death, and particularly the Death of Christ. Mrs. Eddy could not tolerate Christ's talk about His blood. The Last Supper was a mournful occasion, full of the thought of death. It was abolished from the Boston Church of Christian Science. It was not wise. of Jesus to think of death. "I lay down My life for the sheep." How unwise to think like that! It was enough to kill anybody. He might have avoided the cross and lived to a good old age, if only he had set His mind that way. She even persuaded herself that Jesus did not die.

"Jesus was merely fainting when pitying friends took Him down from the cross."

"The lonely precincts of the tomb gave Jesus a refuge from His foes, and a place in which to solve the great problem of being."

Is it desirable to withdraw from public contemplation that Crucified Figure just at a time when this substitute for Christianity is proving only too attractive? Do not these popular tendencies prove the necessity of bringing home to the imagination of the people the reality of the Death of Christ? Is there not a widespread refusal to face the fact of death? Is not this refusal disastrous because it substitutes an unreal world in place of the true?

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