Reverent seekers after truth.—­Religion requires the mind at its best.  There is nothing about religion that will not bear full thought and investigation.  We are not asked to lay aside any part of our powers, can not lay any part of them aside, if we would attain to full religious growth and stature.  Let us therefore train our children to think as they study religion.  Let us lead them to ask and inquire.  Let us train them to investigate and test.  Let us teach them that they never need be afraid of truth, since no bit of truth ever conflicts with, or contradicts any other truth; let us rather encourage them reverently and with open hearts and minds diligently to seek the truth, and then dare to follow where it leads.

THE APPEAL TO IMAGINATION

Imagination, the power of the mind that pictures and makes real, is a key to vivid and lasting impressions.  Unless the imagination recreates the scenes described in the story, or vivifies the events of the lesson, they will have little meaning to the child and appeal but little to his interest.

It is imagination that enables its possessor to take the images suggested in the account of a battle and build them together into the mass of struggling soldiers, roaring cannon, whistling bullets, and bursting shells.  It is imagination that makes it possible while reading the words of the poem to construct the picture which was in the mind of the author as he wrote “The Village Blacksmith,” the twenty-third psalm, or “Snowbound,” and thereby enables the reader himself to take part in the throbbing scenes of life and action.  Without imagination one may repeat the words which describe an act or an event, may even commit them to memory or pass an examination upon them, but the living reality will forever escape him.  It is imagination that will save the beautiful stories and narratives of the Bible from being so many dead words, without appeal to the child.

Imagination required in the study of religion.—­In the teaching of religion we are especially dependent on the child’s use of his imagination.  With younger children the instruction largely takes the form of stories, which must be appropriated and understood through the imagination or not at all.  The whole Bible account deals with people, places, and events distant in time and strange to the child in manner of life and customs.  The Bible itself abounds in pictorial descriptions.  The missionary enterprises of the church lead into strange lands and introduce strange people.  The study of the lives and characters of great men and women and their deeds of service in our own land takes the child out of the range of his own immediate observation and experience.  The understanding of God and of Jesus—­all of these things lose in significance or are in large degree incomprehensible unless approached with a vivid and glowing imagination.

Many older persons confess that the Bible times, places, and people were all very unreal to them while in the Sunday school, and that it hardly occurred to them that these descriptions and narratives were truly about men and women like ourselves.  Hence the most valuable part of their instruction was lost.