Another weakness in our system of religious training for children is manifest at the adolescence-period of the child.  We have been in the habit of allowing the child to consider the Bible-school as his church.  We send him to the Bible-school in his very early years, but make no demands upon him as far as specific church-attendance is concerned.  And at the kindergarten-period we are probably wise in this; for after the child has attended kindergarten for an hour, it is too great a tax upon him to require him to sit through an hour’s church-service.  But after the kindergarten-period it seems to me the plain duty of parents to encourage the child to attend church, though not necessarily for the entire service; for if the child does not establish a church-going habit during these plastic years, the probability is that he will never form it.  This partially explains why there is such a leakage between the Bible-school and the church.  When the child gets “too old for Bible-school,” not having formed the church-going habit, he is stranded

  “Between two worlds,
  One dead, the other powerless to be born.”

And the result is he drifts away from the Church.

In the endeavour to remedy this situation in his own Church it has been the custom of the writer to have all children from seven to twelve years of age in the Bible-school, which meets on Sunday morning before church, attend the morning worship for the first fifteen minutes.  During this time they hear the Call to Worship, the Invocation, the Lord’s Prayer, the Children’s Sermon, and the Anthem by the choir.  At the close of the anthem the children file out with their teachers as the adult congregation rises for the Responsive Lesson.  In this way the children are establishing a church-going habit, with the result that they early begin to feel that something is wrong on Sunday if they have not been to church.

A word as to the content of the sermons preached.  I believe that a child’s religion ought to be largely of the motor type.  That is, it should be concerned with getting religion into the child’s hands and feet.  In other words, it should seek to establish in him a habit of right-doing.  For this reason his religion should be of the most practical sort, leaving the theory to come later.  He should have sufficient theological pegs to hang his morality on, but he should be troubled little with dogma.  For this reason his religion will probably have largely to do with the here and now.  He cannot be much interested in an other-worldly religion.  The normal child at this period will not sing with any great enthusiasm “I want to be an angel.”  For this world is to him just then a very interesting and fascinating place.  He is for that reason ready also to admire men of action, and is wide open for the influences of hero-worship.  And while he cannot be argued into being a Christian, for he is not sufficiently awake to logic; and while he cannot be coerced, for he possesses the dynamic of a locomotive combined with the resistance of a mule, he can be magnetized into being a Christian if there is set as his teacher and example a virile, magnetic man.  The boy will open his soul to him as he does his windows to welcome the breath of May.  Such considerations as these have determined the content of these sermons.