ymns the child is frequently not in the Sunday
services; he is in the children's service or the school, while in the
majority of churches a weak-minded endeavor for amusement has
substituted meaningless rag-time trivialities for rich and dignified
hymns. Perhaps the custom of encouraging congregations to jig, dance,
cavort, or drone through the frivolities of "popular" gospel songs is
only a passing craze, but it is a most unfortunate one; it tends to
divorce worship and thought, to make worship a matter of purely
superficial emotions, and to form the habit of expressing religion, the
highest experience of life, in language, often irreverent and almost
always trivial, slangy, or ridiculous. It is an insult to the
intelligence of children to ask them to sing

We're pilgrims o'er the sands of time,
We have not long to stay,
The lifeboat soon is coming,
To carry the pilgrims away.

It is the duty of parents to know what their children are learning in
the Sunday school. Not only are they often missing the opportunity to
lay up the treasure of elevating, inspiring thoughts; they are acquiring
crude, mistaken, misleading theological concepts in the hideous,
revolting figures of "evangelistic songs"; they are storing their minds
with atrocities in English and in figures of speech; they are acquiring
the habits of sentimentality in religion and inhibiting the finer,
higher feelings. They are blunting their higher feelings by repeating
incongruous and nauseating figures of being "washed in blood," or they
are carelessly singing sentiments they do not understand.

What can the family do about this? It ought to assert its rights in the
church. It ought to protest and rebel against the debauching of mind and
the degrading of religion (all for the sake of selling trashy books at
$25 per hundred). A parent would do better to keep his child from church
and Sunday school than to permit his mind to be filled with the
sanguinary pictures of God, the mediaeval theology of the modern
songbook, and its offenses against truth in thought and form. But the
family can work positively and more effectively by providing good hymns
for children in the home.

Sec. 2. TRAINING IN SONG

Almost without exception all children will sing if encouraged early in
life. In the family group one has only to start a familiar song and soon
all will be singing. It is just as natural to sing "Abide with Me" when
the family sits together