These are illustrations of the concentrated wisdom of the finest hearts and minds the world has seen, words spoken by Inspiration, but true to the experience of every person.  It is our part as teachers to make the great fundamental moral and religious laws which underlie our lives living truths to our pupils.  To do this we must not teach such truths as mere abstractions, but show them at work in the lives of men and women and of boys and girls.  We must find illustrations, we must make applications, and discover examples of proof and verification.

Teaching that fails from lack of applying truth.—­The object, then, of the inductive lesson is to lead the learner to discover truth; the object of the deductive lesson is to lead him to apply truth.  There can be little doubt that much of our teaching of religion suffers from failure to make immediate and vital application of the truths we teach.  When we teach the youth that no man can serve two masters, we should not be satisfied until we have shown him the proof of this truth at work in the everyday experience of men.  When we teach him that the wages of sin is death, we must not stop with the mere statement of fact, but lead him to recognize the effects of sin’s work in broken lives and ruined careers.

Nor should we confine our proofs and illustrations to examples taken from the Bible, valuable as these are.  Too many, perhaps half unconsciously to themselves, carry the impression that religion belongs rather more to Bible times and peoples than to ourselves.  Too many assent to the general truth of religion and the demands it puts on our lives, but fail to make a sufficiently immediate and definite application of its requirements to their own round of daily living.  Too many think of the divine law as revealed in the Scriptures as having a historical significance rather than a present application.  One of the tasks of deductive teaching is to cure this fatal weakness in the study of religion.

THE DRILL LESSON

Teaching religion does not require as large a proportion of drill as many other subjects.  This is because the purpose of drill is to make certain matter automatic in the mind, or to train definite acts to a high degree of skill.  For example, the child must come to know his multiplication table readily, “without thinking”; he must come to be able to write or spell or count or manipulate the keys of a typewriter without directing his attention to the acts required.  Wherever automatic action or ready skill is required, there drill is demanded.  Drill provides for the repetition of the mental or physical act until habit has made it second nature and it goes on practically doing itself.  There is no way to get a high degree of skill without drill, for the simple reason that the brain requires a certain amount of repeated action before it can carry out the necessary operations without error and without the application of conscious thought.