I saw a note book recently prepared by a fifteen-year-old girl which I believe most valuable because of the things about which it has lead her to think.  She had taken as the subject of her book, “The Good Shepherd.”  On the cover was a picture with that title; in the inside a fine collection of pictures representing Jesus as the Good Shepherd, clippings regarding oriental shepherd life, “The Shepherd Psalm,” the Parable of the Lost Sheep and the words of hymns like “The Ninety and Nine” and poems like “That Li’l Black Sheep.”

One cannot soon forget that book with its decorated margins, its neat mounting of cards and clippings and its beautiful pictures.  The effect of the book upon the girl who made it, the teachers said was very apparent.  Another book was entitled “Come Unto Me,” and the pictures, verses and hymns were most impressive.  When each girl has exchanged books with each member of the class, they are to be sent to a rescue home for girls.

The Bible messages to mankind brought by such simple methods into direct contact with a girl in her early teens is one means of nourishing her soul.  If it is true that the best in poetry, art, literature and oratory, as well as the greatest uplift to character, finds its source in that Book the girl should come into real touch with it that it may feed her expanding soul.  It is this sort of first-hand, individual study while she is still a girl which will help her later to turn to the Book for encouragement, comfort and strength, and lead her to great thoughts and the attempting of great things because her own soul is inspired.

The majority of teachers, superintendents and leaders interested in religious instruction today were trained in Christian homes and taught as little children to pray.  Attendance at church services of various kinds gave to them almost unconsciously a phraseology of prayer and impressed upon them the place of prayer in the Christian life.  So familiar is the fact of prayer that they forget that the majority of pupils in the average Sunday-school of today are not familiar with the words of prayer at family worship, are at best irregular in church attendance and that many are associated with no society in the church where there is any training in prayer.

To such young people prayer has nothing to do with life.  They say the Lord’s Prayer at school perhaps, formally and hurriedly in the morning, they hear the prayer from the superintendent’s desk on Sunday, or perchance remember the evening, “Now I lay me down to sleep,” which is said in many homes not Christian, by the little child.  But the prayer; which though only an echo of adult prayers, and only half understood, calms many a fear in a childish heart, helps to victory over sin many a struggling ten-year-old reared in a Christian home, is utterly foreign to the child who has none of these influences and who meets in the average Sunday-school not cultivation, but the abstract taken for granted type of instruction.