GRADED BIBLE STORIES THE PROBLEM OF BIBLE TEACHING The teaching of the Bible to children is so large an undertaking that it affords room for many varieties of failure, as well as several different kinds of success. If the failures have outnumbered the successes, it is doubtless because the wrong ways are more numerous than the right ways, and easier to find. The path finder, the road builder, the superintendent of motive power, and the traffic manager, have evolved, one after another, by a slow process of eliminating waste, applying principles, and organizing resources for efficient work. In much the same way the great business of education is slowly organizing its materials, its processes, and its principles for the elimination of waste and the effective accomplishment of those results which are best. worth while in education. Religious Education is one of the important branches of the larger business of education. And Bible teaching is a fundamental part of Religious Education. In things vital the whole precedes the parts; the whole determines the forms and functions of the parts; and the law of the whole is the law of the parts. It has therefore been necessary for the teaching of letters, science, arts and religion to proceed slowly and crudely, until education as a whole had discovered its values, its motives, and its methods. After a century spent in this latter occupation, it is high time for the law of the whole to be felt governing the parts. Religious Education must be consistently organized in harmony with the laws and ideals of all education; and so shall its aims, its practice and its materials be chosen; for all education must in the end subordinate itself to one set of laws and ideals. The religious life of this generation has suffered from the overshadowing of other interests. The unity of the man has been overlooked; and his religious life has been thought |