These are all fair questions, for knowledge is without meaning except as it becomes a guide to action.  High ideals and beautiful enthusiasms attain their end only when they have eventuated in worthy deeds.  What we do because of our training is the final test of its value.  Conduct, performance, achievement are the ultimate measures of what our education has been worth to us.  By this test we must measure the effects of our teaching.

Summary of the threefold aim.—­The aim in teaching the child religion is therefore definite, even if it is difficult to attain.  This aim may be stated in three great requirements which life itself puts upon the child and every individual: 

     1. Fruitful knowledge; knowledge of religious truths that can be
     set at work in the daily life of the child now and in the years
     that lie ahead.

     2. Right attitudes; the religious warmth, responsiveness,
     interests, ideals, loyalties, and enthusiasms which lead to action
     and to a true sense of what is most worth while.

     3. Skill in living; the power and will to use the religious
     knowledge and enthusiasms supplied by education in shaping the acts
     and conduct of the daily life.

True, we may state our aim in religious teaching in more general terms than these, but the meaning will be the same.  We may say that we would lead the child to a knowledge of God as Friend and Father; that we seek to bring him into a full, rich experience of spiritual union with the divine; that we desire to ground his life in personal purity and free it from sin; that we would spur him to a life crowned with deeds of self-sacrifice and Christlike service; that we would make out of him a true Christian.  This is well and is a high ideal, but in the end it sums up the results of the religious knowledge, attitudes, and acts we have already set forth as our aim.  These are the parts of which the other is the whole; they are the immediate and specific ends which lead to the more distant and general.  Let us, therefore, conceive our aim in both ways—­the ideal Christian life as the final goal toward which we are leading, and the knowledge, attitudes, and acts that make up to-day’s life as so many steps taken toward the goal.

SELECTING THE SUBJECT MATTER

After the aim the subject matter.  When we would build some structure we first get plan and purpose in mind; then we select the material that shall go into it.  It is so with education.  Once we have set before us the aim we would reach, our next question is, What shall be the means of its attainment?  When we have fixed upon the fruitful knowledge, the right attitudes, and the lines of conduct and action which must result from our teaching, we must then ask, What means shall we select to achieve these ends?  What material or subject matter shall we teach in the church school?