But what kinds of memory treasures are being given to the modern child in the realm of religion?  In by far the greater number of instances in the United States neither church nor Sunday school nor home brings to him any knowledge of the great hymns of religion.[15] In the churches that use these hymns the child is frequently not in the Sunday services; he is in the children’s service or the school, while in the majority of churches a weak-minded endeavor for amusement has substituted meaningless rag-time trivialities for rich and dignified hymns.  Perhaps the custom of encouraging congregations to jig, dance, cavort, or drone through the frivolities of “popular” gospel songs is only a passing craze, but it is a most unfortunate one; it tends to divorce worship and thought, to make worship a matter of purely superficial emotions, and to form the habit of expressing religion, the highest experience of life, in language, often irreverent and almost always trivial, slangy, or ridiculous.  It is an insult to the intelligence of children to ask them to sing

    We’re pilgrims o’er the sands of time,
      We have not long to stay,
    The lifeboat soon is coming,
      To carry the pilgrims away.

It is the duty of parents to know what their children are learning in the Sunday school.  Not only are they often missing the opportunity to lay up the treasure of elevating, inspiring thoughts; they are acquiring crude, mistaken, misleading theological concepts in the hideous, revolting figures of “evangelistic songs”; they are storing their minds with atrocities in English and in figures of speech; they are acquiring the habits of sentimentality in religion and inhibiting the finer, higher feelings.  They are blunting their higher feelings by repeating incongruous and nauseating figures of being “washed in blood,” or they are carelessly singing sentiments they do not understand.

What can the family do about this?  It ought to assert its rights in the church.  It ought to protest and rebel against the debauching of mind and the degrading of religion (all for the sake of selling trashy books at $25 per hundred).  A parent would do better to keep his child from church and Sunday school than to permit his mind to be filled with the sanguinary pictures of God, the mediaeval theology of the modern songbook, and its offenses against truth in thought and form.  But the family can work positively and more effectively by providing good hymns for children in the home.

Sec. 2.  TRAINING IN SONG

Almost without exception all children will sing if encouraged early in life.  In the family group one has only to start a familiar song and soon all will be singing.  It is just as natural to sing “Abide with Me” when the family sits together in the evening as it is to start “My Alabama Choo-choo.”  Children like the swing of “Onward, Christian Soldiers” just as much as in the northern states they like “Marching through Georgia.”  If they do not know the hymns the home is the best of all places in which to learn them.