Strayer and Norsworthy, How to Teach.

Weigle, The Pupil and the Teacher.

CHAPTER X

MAKING TRUTH VIVID

Life is a great unbreakable unity.  Thought, feeling, and action belong together, and to leave out one destroys the quality and significance of all.  Religious growth and development involve the same mental powers that are used in the other affairs of life.  The child’s training in religion can advance no faster than the expansion of his grasp of thought and comprehension, the deepening of his emotions, and the strengthening of his will.

It follows from this that religious instruction must call for and use the same activities of mind that are called for in other phases of education.  Not only must the feelings be reached and the emotions stirred, but the child must be taught to think in his religion.  Not only must trust and faith be grounded, but these must be made intelligent.  Not only must the spirit of worship be cultivated, but the child must know Whom and why he worships.  Not only must loyalties be secured, but these must grow out of a realization of the cost and worth of the cause or object to which loyalty attaches.  Religious teaching must therefore appeal to the whole mind.  Besides appealing to the emotions and will it must make use of and train the power of thought, of imagination, of memory; it must through their agency make truth vivid, real, and lasting, and so lay the foundation for spiritual feeling and devotion.

LEARNING TO THINK IN RELIGION

Much has been gained in teaching religion when we have brought the child to see that understanding, reason, and common sense are as necessary and as possible here as in other fields of learning.  This does not mean that there are not many things in religion that are beyond the grasp and comprehension of even the greatest minds, to say nothing of the undeveloped mind of the child.  It means, rather, that where we fail to grasp or understand it is because of the bigness of the problem, or because of its unknowableness, and not because its solution violates the laws of thought and reason.

The reign of law, the inexorable working of cause and effect, and the application of reason to religious matters should be conveyed to the child in his earliest impressions of religion.  For example, the child has learned a valuable lesson when he has comprehended that God asks obedience of his children, not just for the sake of compelling obedience, but because obedience to God’s law is the only way to happy and successful living.  The youth has grasped a great truth when it becomes clear to his understanding that Jesus said, “To him that hath shall be given,” not from any failure to sympathize with the one who might be short in his share, but because this is the great and fundamental law of being to which even Jesus himself was subject; and that when Paul said, “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,” he was not exacting an arbitrary penalty, but expressing the inevitable working of a great law.  The boy who defined faith as “believing something you know can’t be true” had been badly taught concerning faith.