which may have a modest but effective part in the church service.

One of the reasons for this development is the superior beauty of the church building itself. Is it fair to the children for the church to construct a costly and beautiful house of worship, and then proceed to conduct the exercises of worship for children in another part of the building not nearly so beautiful? Few churches can afford to build two sanctuaries, and none ought to. If the rooms of the parish house are devised for general assembly, lectures, secular discussions, social affairs, dramatics, and other such purposes, they cannot at the same time be made so beautiful for worship as the church itself, which is made primarily for worship. Beginners and primary scholars have attractive rooms of their own. But if the juniors and intermediates do not attend the regular church service, then their own service of worship should be held in the main church and not in a hall or other lesser room. In any case, the superior dignity and beauty of the church building itself should be brought to bear as an influential force upon the lives of the children. It is throwing away a great opportunity not to do this. Without any danger of superstition, we may yet develop something of the attitude of reverence in the House of God which the older churches demand. It is easier to do this if the building itself is a noble structure.

If the children attend the church service, the church service must be planned for their needs as well as for the adult experience. To this end many ministers preach a children's sermon. There are many things to say for this practice. A still better method, however, is to have the children's sermon in their own room, by themselves, immediately after they have marched out of the regular church service. The chief difficulty is in finding someone to do it. With the larger parish organization and the varied ministry that will characterize the future church, this plan will be more widely utilized.

Meanwhile the usages and practices of the regular order of worship in the church can be greatly improved in the direction of their appeal to the young. For this reason, it

becomes desirable to use every opportunity that is dignified for the development of color, symbolism, and movement, in the regular church service. Whatever adds to the interest of the service to the eye as well as to the ear is pertinent at this point. And those who make experiments in this direction will probably discover that the children are not the only ones for whom things to be seen as well as things to be heard are interesting.

Religious education is not a limited process. It is a lifelong enterprise. It is not for children only, but for all of us through all our years. Here enters another important fact which bears directly upon what we shall do or not do about the development of the arts in religion. The fact is this, that younger communities in our country are free and easy in their manners and conservative in their thought; older communities are conservative in their manners, all the while that they are also inclined to be more liberal in their thinking. The liberal theology is more developed in the churches of the East, and also the better usages in the art of worship. In the West, the preaching is more conservative, while the forms of worship are less conventional. The older communities are superior at both points.

The place for new thought is the pulpit. The pulpit stands for prophecy, for proposals of change, for fearless examination of truth, for an outlook toward the future. Yet the religious community desires also to value the past. It needs to revere and to conserve the great spiritual victories and judgments of the fathers. It needs to preserve and pass on its great wealth of inherited devotion. The place for this conserving force is the service of worship. Here is the proper vehicle of transmission. Here is given abundant expression, in the elder forms, of the great answers that religion always has to the few primary, personal problems of existence. The new things are not yet formulated. They need examination and criticism. The place for setting forth new proposals is not in forms and exercises, but in the free utterance of the free preacher. Religious education, like all education, will always include the culture derived from the

past and the scientific examination of proposals for the future.

The children and the youth have a right to expect that we will convey to them the riches we have received. There is no better way than the direct contact of reverent worship, as that utilizes the literary treasures of the Bible and the later Christian centuries, together with the reverent exercises of devotion.

How much better for adults, also, if they get their conservatism in hours of worship rather than in preaching. If the preaching is conservative and the forms are free and easy, the people never will be religiously educated. They will get neither the new nor the old. They will hear no fresh discussion of the new things they ought to be considering if they are to grow in the knowledge and the practice of the truth. Nor, on the other hand, will they ever be truly cultured in the old things, for by no possibility can the inherited devotional riches of the faith be transmitted and ever freshly enjoyed in a free and easy exercise of worship.

Part of the fault for the situation just described lies in the theological seminaries. They are in these days openminded and abundant in their teaching of the new things. They set forth the forward look in matters of science and ethics and theology. They are deficient in their treatment of the past. This seems a strange thing to say, when it is popularly supposed that they are too much rooted in the past. They make much of the past, to be sure, but in the wrong category. They connect with the theological thinking of the past more successfully than with the spiritual culture of the past, two quite different things. There is instruction in the thinking and the action of the past, together with slight conveyance of the feeling of the past.

Religious history is set forth too largely as something dead and done for, something with which you should be familiar as an educated man, but not something that need enter deeply into your life as a cultured man. There is not a sufficient alignment of historic facts with those permanent elements in human nature which perennially appear and reappear. There is no sufficient sense of the swing and re

swing of the pendulum of human feeling, and the reappearance of many problems and the reappearance of many solutions in the spiritual life of the race. The courses of study are not lacking in mentality or in historic information; they are lacking in culture.

They have often sent out men to preach old thoughts but not equipped to conserve old feelings. It should be just turned about. They should send out men thoroughly equipped and competent to bear to people the noble worths of the Christian treasury in superior forms and exercises, while at the same time equipped freely to engage in problems of the new thought and the new morals. The true religious education must include not only scientific thinking and social conduct, but also religious culture.

Lest I seem to be too harsh respecting the provision of theological schools in this matter, the last catalogue of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago lists more than four hundred courses offered by its regular faculty and the allied religious houses. Among these there are just two which are devoted to the subject of public worship.

Besides all this, many students of society are beginning to realize afresh that education in general is not complete without religion. There is rapidly developing a widespread dissatisfaction with the seemingly unavoidable secularity of the great state universities. These big institutions are magnificent embodiments of American idealism as well as of American ambition and efficiency. There is, nevertheless, a highly unfortunate weakness about any educational system inhibited from a free display of the history of the human spirit and from anything but a meager provision for conveying to the maturing citizen a moving sense of the highest values. It will some day be disastrous to the life of the state if this condition becomes accepted as a possibly permanent one. It need not be permanent except for the divisiveness of religion itself. It is an ever present challenge to the church to become unified, and that not merely respecting Protestantism, but rather respecting the whole of Christianity.

Meanwhile, there are untried opportunities for enriching

the cultural standards of these universities by a greater notice and tutelage of the fine arts. Something of the same amplitude which is accorded literary studies needs to be provided for in other artistic fields. Without taking the place of religion, such a procedure would, nevertheless, go very far in the direction of emphasizing value judgments and value experience as compared to the preponderance of study in the world of facts. Meanwhile, also, the demand for education is so great that philanthropists may well give renewed attention to the smaller Christian college. The population of our great western states will be so large that all will be needed. The college which is free from political connection is free to develop not only religious teaching, but the great cultural exercises of religion, in which alone the whole personality comes to the highest self-realization.

Religious education is a concern of statesmen as well as of churchmen. The last word has not yet been said concerning the relations of church and state. Among the categories from which light on these vexed and intricate problems will be derived are not only goodness and truth but also beauty.

And in this whole matter of the relations of art and education, the primary need is a change of attitude toward beauty. Like truth and goodness, it is an end in itself. It is one of the supreme values. We try to help children to be good for practical and social ends, but also because goodness is ultimate, because it derives from a divine mandate. So, also, art will help us as an excellent means to other ends, but this is not the chief reason for its being. By this I do not mean just what the old cry "art for art's sake" demanded; yet something very like it. One of the essentials of education, both general and religious, is beauty. To help young lives to see and enjoy beauty is to help them apprehend God.