er.--The Boy and the Church (.75).

Gray.--Non-Church Going, Its Reasons, and Remedies ($1.00).

Hodges.--Training of Children in Religion ($1.50).

Hulbert.--The Church and Her Children ($1.00).

IV

THE SUNDAY SCHOOL OR CHURCH SCHOOL

The Sunday school is the biggest force of the church in the life of the
boy. At times he refuses to attend the stated worship of the church, but
if the Sunday school be in the least interesting he will gladly attend
it. Its exercises and procedure must, however, be interesting, and
rightly so. The boy has the right to demand that the time, his own time,
which he gives to the Sunday school, should be utilized to some decently
profitable, pleasurable end. Education, even religious education, is not
necessarily a painful process. Discipline of mind or body has ceased to
be a series of disagreeable, rigid postures or exercises. Medicine has
no virtue merely because it is bad to the taste, and modern medical
usage prescribes free air and warm sunshine in large doses in place of
the old-time bitter nostrums. Even where the boy spirit needs
medication, the means employed need not be sepulchral gloom, solemn
warning, other-world songs, and penitential prayers, with great moral
applications of the non-understandable. The germs of spiritual disease
give way before the sunshine of the spirit, just as fast, if not faster,
than the microbes before the sun. The Sunday school, then, should be a
happy, joyous, sunny place, brimful of ideas, suggestion and impulse;
for these three are at once the giants and fairies of religious
education, and are the essential elements of character-making.

To produce all of the above, three things are needed: adequate
organization, careful supervision, and common-sense leading. The first
is imperative, because all education is a matter of organization. The
second is part of the first, as supervision is the genius of
organization. The third is fundamental, for all expression--true
education--depends on the teacher or leader, whose innate idea of the
fitness of things keeps him from doing, on the one hand, that which is
just customary, or, on the other hand, that which may appear to be just
scientific. The science of yesterday should be the tradition of today;
that is, if we are making progress in educational processes. Today's
science also should be fighting yesterday's for supremacy. Common sense
lies somewhere between the two.

The only two of these th