country with the uniform lessons they always had class teachers, and under such conditions that teacher would not need to get any more teachers than she had before.

Question No. 2: "Can a teacher teach the first and second year courses to a beginners class in the same hour, the class numbering about forty?"

MRS. BARNES: I do not know what she could do if she tried, but it is not necessary to do it because the beginners courses of study, first and second years, are not like the other courses, but intended to follow one another. They are intended to rotate, and every school will do well to use but one year at a time.

Question No. 3: "Has it been found best to have the pupil prepare the lesson before the Sunday hour and during the week?"

MRS. MAUD JUNKIN BALDWIN: In the first year Junior the child prepares the lesson under the guidance of the teacher. For the second, the third and the fourth years the plan is that he shall prepare the lesson before.

Question No. 4: "Would you send a class home without a lesson, using graded lessons, rather than give them a teacher who is not prepared?"

MRS. BARNES: If you have no teacher you will have to provide for them in some other way. I would never send a child home without a lesson.

DR. ROBERT P. SHEPHERD: I would. There is a multitude of children in this country who would be better off with their parents than to be the helpless victims of incompetent Sunday-school teachers.

PROF. GEORGE ALBERT COE: One of the large churches in New York City never allows an unprepared teacher to take a class for a single Sunday. If the teacher is not there the class is not taught.

REV. DAVID G. DOWNEY, D. D.: If you have it as a rule that the class be sent home if there is not a prepared teacher, it behooves us as Sunday-school pastors and superintendents to see to it that no class is without a competent teacher. We have no business to bring pupils to the Sunday-school and then send them home.

MISS FERGUSON: We have a good graded union, and I solicit the girls and women who I think are able to teach in the primary department to attend the Graded Union and get help in the sectional work and come prepared to teach the lesson. I always know when my teachers are going to be absent. One of the rules of my department provides that I shall be informed, and then I can call on one of those girls.

Question No. 5: "What would you do when your teachers say they do not like the graded lessons and will not teach them?"

MISS FERGUSON: I would send them to a county convention in Nebraska if I could get them there.

Question No. 6: "Many teachers assert that it is unreasonable to expect Sunday-school pupils to study the lesson at home; how can this be overcome?"

PROF. GEORGE ALBERT COE: I do not think that any single answer to that question suffices. There are Sunday-schools the children of which come from homes that do not help them to prepare the lesson. I know of cases in which the teachers prefer to have done what can be done well during the Sunday-school hour, and stop there. If possible something should be done, I think, during the week, but the center should always be the drill of the child during the Sunday-school hour. Question No. 7: "Is the percentage of conversions greater as a result of the graded lesson studies?''

MISS ALLEN: I think it is. It is a natural consequence. It must

come.

MISS FERGUSON: When I began teaching I did not have the graded lessons, and my teachers were timid and would not pray in public. Every teacher I have is a consecrated worker and will pray in public and do all those things we want our teachers to do, and this has come about since we began the use of the graded lessons. We do see more conversions in the graded department. I send my children out as near their ninth birthday as October will permit. Last year I had a class of fourteen come into the church, and I am sure it was due to the graded lessons, to what the graded lessons have done for the teacher and the pupil.

MRS. MARY FOSTER BRYNER: In a convention which I attended one of the junior teachers reported that as they went through the lessons in the life of Christ they formed those juniors into a special class for instruction, and there were thirty of them who accepted Christ, and twenty-eight of them united with the church at the next communion. I was present at a church conference where there were six people admitted on the last communion Sunday, and four of these were from one class of boys ten and eleven years of age, taught by an earnest teacher of the junior department. I feel sure, from the testimonies coming in and the letters received, that we are beginning to see some of the spiritual results of the teaching of these lessons to the boys and girls.

MISS MARGARET BROWN: There are six persons here who are teachers in Nebraska, and if they had time they would testify that these

lessons have permitted them to bring Christ to the child more definitely than in any other way, and that the child of his own accord desires to come into the church.

MRS. MAUD JUNKIN BALDWIN: Several months ago I sent out a questionnaire to all of the county elementary superintendents in our State. One of the questions was, "How do you feel about the spiritual results from the use of the graded lessons?" Most of them said that it was too early to know of large results, but many of them referred to what they felt was to come in the future, and also spoke of definite spiritual results which were coming to them in their own departments.

DR. ROBERT P. SHEPHERD: From reports at twelve conventions which I have attended the result of the graded lessons has been uniform through the natural unfolding of the life of the child. The graded lessons appeal to every thoughtful teacher, because they make him a Christ teacher.

MRS. BARNES: Two months ago I attended a meeting in Brooklyn, and they got started on this question and would not get off it, and it made no difference what the denomination was, they all said that the boys and girls came naturally, that the children came up saying, “I would like to be a follower, too."

Question No. 8: "Why should any pupil be kept on a waiting list at a Sunday School?"

DR. ROBERT P. SHEPHERD: Let that question be referred to Prof. Coe, who is a teacher in that Sunday-school.

PROF. GEORGE ALBERT COE: Our space is limited, and we can take only so many pupils. The number is limited by the conditions. Since we can take only so many pupils we put any more who wish to come on a waiting list, and give them the first chance.

MR. W. C. PEARCE: I know of quite a number of schools that had to pitch tents and put floors and heat and light in them. I recommend that idea for use in New York.

This question haunts me. What is

DR. ROBERT P. SHEPHERD: the use of anybody being kept on a waiting list? When you get home I wish you would ask your pastors and superintendents how many are on the waiting list and who they are. I think the rest of the human race are on our waiting list, and God will hold us responsible.

Question No. 9: "Is it feasible to have a uniform subject for all classes in the graded lesson?''

MISS FERGUSON: You cannot decide what is going to rule in the construction of your course. If it is feasible it is not best to have the same set of subjects.

Question No. 10: "What about the teachers' meeting under the graded lessons?''

MR. J. H. ENGLE, Kansas: We think we have been getting on pretty well with a monthly council. Instead of studying the lesson Jones makes his original outline of the lesson and submits it for critieism, or Smith makes out his teaching plan of the lesson and submits it for criticism. The various grades are represented, not always in the same way. A young lady tells the primary story as she expects to tell it the next Sunday, and we open a "trouble box," and we have a frank discussion of various questions.

Question No. 11: "How has temperance teaching been affected by the use of the graded elementary lessons?""

MRS. ZILLAH FOSTER STEVENS: If you have examined the temperance lessons for the primary years and the junior years you will find that most of them come in June, July and August. How many of you who are using the graded lessons observe the World's Temperance Sunday in November? (A few hands were upraised.) I think the question has answered itself. It seems that where the graded lessons are used the World's Temperance Sunday is not observed. There is some criticism concerning the Temperance Lessons in the Graded Course. Recall the names of these lessons: "Sodom and Gomorrah,” “Nadab and Abihu, and the Prodigal Son." These are all pictures of adult life, and not of noble examples to be imitated, but of evil, to be avoided. We need a selection of temperance lessons which shall give us examples of strength and courage and moral heroism, instead of lessons about Eli's sons who made themselves vile, and so on. These junior lessons come at a time when it is urged we put the Bible into the children's hands and have them read it themselves. Is it proper for children nine and ten years of age to read the three chapters on Samson, the strong man with a weak will? That selection describes Samson yielding to the beguilements of his Philistine wife. The only other temperance lesson in the same year gives us the end of Eli's house, where the description is of Eli's sons making themselves vile, and the rest of the description is so unspeakable that I could not read it out loud to you. There is surely need for change here.

THE ESSENTIAL AIMS OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

JOHN T. MCFARLAND, D. D., NEW YORK.

Education, broadly conceived, is the process by which it is sought to bring a man or woman to self-realization. In other words the aim of

education is to develop the latent or germinal elements, qualities and powers of a human being. This means the making of a whole or complete man or woman. This educational ideal, it is safe to say, has never been realized. It has been a process of approximation. The perfect man at which education aims has not been produced, perhaps will never be produced.

Religious education, which belongs to general education, is the process by which it is sought to bring man to moral or spirital self-realization. This has been the labor of the ages and will be the labor of the ages still to come.

It must be assumed in all educational effort that we have something to educate. Education is not creation. We must have the raw materials upon which to work. And education deals not with dead but living things. The physical trainer must have a living body with which to work. A corpse should be sent to the cemetery, not to the gymnasium. The educator of mind must have a living mind having capacity for receiving knowledge and powers and faculties capable of being drawn out and exercised. An idiot should be sent to an asylum, not to a school. And religious education assumes the existence of a living soul having spiritual faculties, a nature capable of moral perception and understanding and action. A dead soul, if we can conceive of such a thing, may be an interesting subject for theological autopsy and dissection but not for religious education.

This thought is fundamental to our work as religious educators. The Sunday-school is not a morgue, but a school which deals with spiritual life. The soul does not come into the world spiritually still-born, but alive, having in it all the latencies of immortality, holding an infolded life capable of infinite unfolding into spiritual strength and beauty. Let no theological mists obscure this fact. Our work in religious education begins with life and deals always with spiritual vitalities. The children whom God has given us are the living children of the living God. Christ declared that they belonged to his kingdom; he called them his lambs and he commands us to feed them. Not the dead, but the living may be fed.

If, therefore, religious education begins with life, a soul spiritually alive, this fact points the way for its effort and defines its aims. The only business of religious education is to minister to spiritual life. The soul's life must be constantly kept in view; what it requires for its development, what is demanded for the satisfaction of its hunger, what is necessary for its strengthening and perfecting must be given first consideration. Nothing else, in fact, is religious education. If we sub