Religious truth does not contradict reason.—­To begin with, while all of us come to believe many things that we cannot fully understand, not even the child should be asked to believe what plainly contradicts common sense and so puts too great a strain on credulity.  In a certain Sunday school class the lesson was about Peter going up on the housetop to pray, and the vision that befell him there.  This class of boys, living in a small village, had had no experience with any kind of housetop except that formed of a sharply sloping roof.  Therefore the story looked improbable to them, and one boy asked how Peter could sleep up on the roof and keep from falling off.  The teacher, also uninformed concerning the flat roofs of Oriental houses, answered, “John, you must remember that with God all things are possible.”  And John had that day had the seeds of skepticism planted in his inquiring mind.  Another teacher, thinking to allay any tendency on the part of his class to question the literal accuracy of the story of Jonah and the whale, said, “This story is in the Bible, and we must believe it, for whatever is in the Bible is true; and if the Bible were to say that Jonah swallowed the whale that would be true, and we would have to believe that also.”  But who can doubt that, with boys and girls trained in the schools and by their contact with life itself to think, such an invitation to lay aside all reason and common sense can do other in the long run than to weaken confidence in the Bible, and so lessen the significance of many of its beautiful lessons?

True thinking about Bible truths.—­What, then, shall we teach the child about the literalness of the Bible?  Nothing.  This is not a question for childhood.  The Bible should be brought to the child in the same spirit as any other book, except with a deep spirit of reverence and appreciation not due other books.  Parts of the Bible are plainly history, and as accurate as history of other kinds is.  Other parts are accounts of the lives of people, and the descriptions are wonderfully vivid and true to life.  Other parts are plainly poetry, and should be read and interpreted as poetry.  Other parts are clearly the stories and legends current in the days when the accounts were written, and should be read as other stories and legends are read.  The great question is not the problem of the literal or the figurative nature of the truth, but the problem of discovering for the child the rich nugget of spiritual wisdom which is always there.

When the young child first hears the entrancing Bible stories he does not think anything about their literalness; he only enjoys, and perhaps dimly senses the hidden lesson or truth they contain.  This is as it should be.  Later, when thought, judgment, and discrimination are developing and beginning to play their part in the expanding mind, questions are sure to arise at certain points.  This is also as it should be.