“Primitive methods” we call those studies now, and contemn, gravely or jeeringly, the obsolete practice of “going through” the Bible yearly by reading a given number of chapters every day.  We assume that those were mechanical contrivances which, at the best, filled the mind with an undigested mass of Biblical matter and made sacred things trite.  They who censure or sneer take no exception to the story that Demosthenes translated the works of Thucydides eight times, and also committed them to memory, that his style might be informed with the spirit and tone of his favorite exemplar.  We cannot do away with the pregnant truth that the Bible-reading child of 1845 so steeped imagination and memory in the Holy Word that the wash of years and the acids of doubt have never robbed him of it.  The Psalms and gospels then learned stay by us yet, responsive to the prick of temptation, the stroke of sorrow, the sunlight of joy.  When strongly moved we unconsciously fall into Scriptural phraseology.  God’s promises then learned are our song in the house of our pilgrimage.  We do not confound patriarchs with prophets, or passages from the epistles with the Psalms of David.

I am continually confronted by illustrations of the truth that the “contract system” prevails in religious teaching as extensively as in the manufacture of garments and food and furniture, and that the results in all cases are the same.  Machine work cannot compare in neatness and durability with hand-made goods.  The complaint, “I cannot get my Bible class to study the lessons,” is almost universal.  I have known large classes of adults to be made up with the express proviso that none of the members should be expected to prepare the lesson.  Their appearance in the classroom at the stated hour fulfills their part of the compact.  In thus presenting themselves they “press the button.”  The teacher does the rest.  The mother, taking her afternoon siesta, or reading her Sunday novel at home, rarely knows the subject of the Bible lesson, much less what the teacher’s treatment of it is.

I do not mention the pastor purposely.  Except when he sees them in the Sunday-school, the faces of the children belonging (by courtesy) to his cure of souls are seldom beheld by him.  The Sunday-school originally intended for the neglected children of the illiterate poor, has come to be the chief instrumentality upon which well-to-do church members depend for the spiritual upbuilding of those who are to form the church of the future.  If one is tempted to challenge the assertion, let him compare the number of children (not infants) enrolled in our Sunday-schools with those who habitually attend upon divine service.  The absence of the sunny, restless polls from the rows of worshipers in the pews, the troops of boys and girls who wend their way homeward at the conclusion of the Sunday-school exercises are accounted for by so-called humane apologists by the plea that two services in one day are burdensome to the little folk.  And mothers “enjoy the service far more when they are not disturbed by fidgety or drowsy children.”  “Then, too, much of the sermon is unintelligible to them.  Why torture them by a mere form?”