s offer as stimulant to the ethical imagination, and sometimes
as definite incitements to imitation, men and women whose social
surroundings were quite other than those we are now striving to
secure. How seldom is the teacher able to make the distinctions in
social judgment required for full understanding of the character
without spoiling the personal influence of the hero extolled. This is
particularly true in the use of much Biblical material in Sunday
School and in the unexplained classic references to the great and
good. One wonders what children are thinking about, children who read
in the daily papers long and spectacular accounts of trials for bigamy
or adultery, when the worthies of the Old Testament are spoken of and
their two or several wives taken as a matter of course in the lesson!
One wonders what is the meaning of justness or kindness to the
"servant" conveyed to the child in commandments which link together a
man's ox and his ass, his laborer and his wife! The fact is that
education has a narrow and perilous path to travel in moral lessons of
every sort, a path between a dull and critical analysis of differences
in moral standards and moral practice in the ages from which we have
come and a wholesale commendation of people who would be haled before
our modern courts for disobedience to laws were they to reappear upon
our streets. The need for stimulation of the ethical imagination is so
great, however, that we must dare this perilous path and master its
difficulties. Perhaps no one has been able to do this more effectively
than Mr. Gould, of the Moral Education Committee of England, who has
used the story method with consummate tact in building up from the
lower motive and the more ancient condition a series of pictures of
human greatness, which end always on some summit of personal devotion
in universal conditions to universal laws of right.[18] His method
leaves the pupil in a glow of admiration of excellence without dulling
his perception of realities of every-day life in his own time and
place.

However difficult, we must try by some method to make youth realize
what is excellent in those who have lived far enough in the past to
inspire reverence and yet keep some connection between those heroes
and sages of the older times and the march of human life upward and
onward. Especially is this the case in all treatment of the family
relation. We need not banish Chaucer's "Griselda" from the collections
o