the other, the abode of darkness and death.

Religious education, according to this view, resolves itself into an authoritative promulgation of a divinely revealed doctrine, law, or ritual. It is It is an imposition of an order of thought and action upon men from above, rather than the development and cultivation of latent elements within men. The supernatural power may operate by an immediate act of God, by sacramental infusion, or by official instruction. Men must conform to the prescribed system, not because it is an expression of an inner experience, but because it is an arbitrary mandate of a divine sovereign. The spirit of this system is dogmatic, infallible, intolerant, and exclusive.

For the

plan of salvation and the power of redemption are from God. Man's reason and will have no value, and the natural order must therefore give way to the supernatural scheme. The function of the prophet and the priest, the apostle and the minister, is to make known revealed truth and to administer the divine ordinance so as to deliver men from condemnation and to prepare them for the celestial realm. The decisive factor in the whole process is usually the will of God, and the ultimate goal is the divine glory. These ideas and practises are based upon a distinctive conception of God and his relation to the world, of man and his original and fallen condition, of revelation and redemption-conceptions that are antiquated and out of harmony with the modern world-view. Men are, therefore, seeking a new method of religious education in the twentieth century.

The second view of religious education presupposes men to be by nature children of God. When, at a certain stage of the evolving universe, the animal turned human, he had in him. the potencies of a god and of a demon. He was neither a saint nor a sinner,

but a tangle of good and evil. The propensities of a brute and the proclivities of a Christ were slumbering in the primitive babe lapped on the bosom of nature. To rear living persons, who are in harmony with the divine will as embodied in the universe, . men and women who realize the privileges of divine sonship and human brotherhood,-this became the task of God. As it was the motive for turning chaos into cosmos, it became the goal of nature and of history. The scope of God's educational activity is as wide as the universe, and is coextensive with humanity.

God is having the whole race in training every tribe and nation. God seeks man and man gropes after God. Each stage of civilization and of religion represents an effort of God to realize his life in the soul of man. The whole of life, as well as the whole of humanity, is under divine control. The work of salvation, or of religious education, is not confined to an elect group, whom God has arbitrarily chosen to become the objects of his grace, but it affects all men alike, tho in a different order and degree. In other words all history is part of a single process, in which God is training men for membership in his kingdom. All history is the history of redemption.

Mankind can not therefore be divided into two opposing sections-a kingdom of evil and a kingdom of righteousness, a state of sin and a state of grace. History is a series of stages in the upward progress of the race under the discipline of God, each stage having only a relative degree of goodness, in which men are still hindered by the power of sin and the pang of guilt. The highest and ultimate plane is reached in Christianity, in which men find the completion of their aspirations and the crown of life.

While the processes of nature, the movements of history, and the institutions of the social order-the home,

the school, and the State-have educational and disciplinary value in the making of a Christ-like race, men, however, can not realize the divine purpose by spontaneous and automatic evolution, somewhat as the seed turns into a sprout, the egg into a chick, or the bud into a flower. God makes things, but he must educate

persons.

At a certain point in the ascent of life instinct becomes rational volition, sensualism becomes sin, action becomes ethical, the dumb brute becomes a responsible person-intelligent and free. Here is the mystery of religion and the tragedy of life. Now the conflict between God and man, or between the divine in man and the beast in man begins.

"A spark disturbs our clod."

so there are grades of religion. Yet the higher grade can be reached only through the lower.

It becomes the duty not only of the towering individual to instruct his kinsman, but of the rising tribe to teach neighboring tribes. The cosmopolitan stage is reached in the highest civilizations when culture and religion break through national boundaries, and are born in the name of the supreme deity over empires and continents until the whole world becomes the kingdom of God. The missionary motive accordingly inheres in the nature of things, in the constitution of men, in the structure of the universe, and in the spirit of the immanent God.

All this must be accomplished, not simply by the power of God, but also

would not sink i' the scale."

"A God tho in the germ."

God educates men through men. This fact is based on a law that controls the whole evolutionary process. As nothing comes into being from God in things except through things, so nothing comes from God to man except through man, through organs or faculties of human transmission. Men, therefore, are to be intelligent and responsible coworkers with God in the education of the race. Religious education is man's as well as God's supreme task.

In each group there are gifted persons, prophets since the world began, and they become the leaders, and teachers, the kings and priests, of the tribe or nation. The vision which they behold on the mount they work into life on the plain. However crude their doctrines and their methods, they are leading men upward and helping them to comprehend the spiritual possessions of their tribe. The quality of instruction improves with the advance of civilization; and just as there are grades of science, politics, and art,

the universe, and becomes a citizen in the kingdom and a friend and heir of the King.

Those who refuse to heed the divine call or resist the lure of the Christthe Christ in Jesus, the Christ in the universe, the Christ latent in the human heart-"know not the time of their visitation," and must suffer the consequence of their choice. Whether a human person is indissoluble or annihilable is a matter for speculation. Whether ultimately infinite love can woo and win every soul, or whether life is a great venture in which some succeed and others fail, is a question to

be decided by dogmaticians rather than by historians.

We recognize more clearly now than ever before, to use Tertullian's phrase, that not only is the soul of man naturally Christian-anima Christiana naturaliter; but also that the animating and actuating spirit of the universe is Christian. The training process for the making of Christlike manhood and womanhood extends far beyond ecclesiastical boundaries. The scientific method, the democratic spirit, the consciousness of the unity of the race and the interdependence of nations, the growing sentiments for universal peace, and the development of the social conscience can not all be directly traced to the influence of the organized Church, but they are an evidence of the operation, in the bosom of men, of the immanent Christ who became flesh in Jesus.

Yet religious education reaches its most efficacious form in the proclamation of the gospel of the kingdom by Jesus Christ. The Church of the living God is the pillar and ground of the truth. The Christ latent in every person is stirred to action when he is confronted by the challenge of the historical Jesus. Deep calls unto deep, the Father speaks unto his child. He awakes a sense of opposition between the natural man and the spiritual man. He demands repentance and unconditional surrender. He invites men to follow him in the path of life. The all-important thing is that he has power to transform men into strong, regenerate, self-sacrificing personalities. The kingdom of God is not an institution or a dogma, but a group of individuals in whom God dwells and whose chief joy is to live for their fellow men.

The mission of the Church, therefore, as well as the motive and object of religious education, is to continue, throughout the world and to the end of time, the work of her Lord who "went about in all Galilee, teaching

in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of diseases." It is only when men are brought under the power of the gospel, when they identify themselves with the kingdom of God, that they are up-borne in their aspirations and efforts by the powers of nature and by the tides in the affairs of men.

This conception of religious education, like the former, is, also, based upon a distinctive view of the world. and of life-a modern view in contrast to the medieval and the ancient. It may be characterized and epitomized as follows: God is immanent in the world, ethically but not spatially transcendent; the world-view is a theistic monism, not a deistic dualism; the universe is an evolving process, not a finished product; the religion of the Spirit takes the place of religions of authority; the social order is democratic, not monarchical; society is the object of redemption, not simply the individual.

By this time the reader may be yawning, and crying out in despair,

professors."

cease theorizing, and tell us something practical. We be men of action, busy pastors, and have scant time for the fruitless speculation of theological professors." The writer has been in the pastorate sufficiently long to lend an attentive ear to this cry of distress. Yet, upon second thought, it seems to him that we might as well have ordered the builders of the Brooklyn Bridge to stop digging through sand and clay and rock for a solid base for the gigantic pillars, and at once begin the stretching of cables through thin air without columnar support, as to attempt a reconstruction and improvement of our political and religious institutions without basing them upon the rockbed of ultimate principles discerned by painstaking investigation and profound thinking. If we may trust again the judgment of John Stuart Mill,

"no great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought."

It will take time, however, and the patience of the saints, before such fundamental changes become the conscious possession of the people and are embodied in social institutions and turned into modes of action. This is not the work of a day, or even of a lifetime, but of centuries. We rejoice none the less in an occasional glimpse of an ideal, the first gray streaks of the dawn which are the harbinger of the splendor of noon.

In the nature of the case methods must be worked out gradually. They will vary in different lands and among different groups. A fixt and final method is as impossible as an infallible dogma. Modes of operation are determined by previous conditions, racial genius, degrees of culture, social and religious heritage. The laws of evolution forbid a radical breach with the past. Men grope their way from the old to the new; they often stumble from the old to the new. The different branches of the Church will adopt different methods of instruction; but in the end they will make contributions toward the unity of ideals in a diversity of forms and applications. By fellowship, toleration, and cooperation, such as we have in the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, the Ecumenical Missionary Conference, the World's Sunday-school Convention, the Religious Education Association, and the American Educational Association, theories and practises will be wrought out that will commend themselves to the cultured minds of the nation, if not of the world.

However great may be the diversity in the methods of the religious education of the twentieth century, we may, with some degree of certainty, anticipate certain of its salient features.

(1) The unity of purpose of religious and secular education will be more and more recognized, and the sharp distinction between the church school and the state school will no longer be made. "To prepare for complete living," says Herbert Spencer, "is the function which education has to discharge"-a definition from which Jesus would not dissent and which covers all the purposes of the Church in the nurture of its members. The substance of instruction will always be classified as scientific, esthetic, moral, and religious; and the different branches will be taught by special persons. Yet as all truth is from God, so all education will be regarded as religious and all religion as educational.

(2) Religious education will conform to the best authenticated principles and methods of pedagogy and will seek the development of the religious nature in every human being for social service, as a preparation for eternal life. In the language of Professor John Dewey, "the child is to share in the inherited resources of the race and to use his own powers for social ends."

(3) Every social institution will be considered as a factor in the making of human life and therefore as having moral and religious value. The making of men will be put above the making of dividends. The line between the sacred and the profane will disappear.

(4) Religious education will become a function of the State. When the gospel has leavened the nation, the State will treat the citizen as a religious as well as a political being, and complete citizenship will involve the training of the religious no less than the intellectual and social nature of the individual. Thus religion will naturally become a part of the national scheme of instruction. In place of the monarchical state church of the past,