OUR SUNDAY SCHOOLS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19583, 12 September 1925, Page 5

OUR SUNDAY SCHOOLS

By Amplixts.

Give a child the benefit of the doubt. Hiis year October 18 is being observed aa "Young People’s Day bv the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand. Preach Christ; preach the Word in season and out of season; and teach the children. One of God's chief methods for preserving His fields from tares, is to sow them early with wheat.” —Spurgeon. A very fine essay on “Moses, the Man and His Work,” by Miss M. K. Scorgie. is published in this week’s Outlook. The paper is a test sot for the first term’s work this year in the Biblical course at the Otago School of Religious Education. This Biblical course is obligatory on all who enter the school. “Neither in its content nor in its method is the curriculum an end in itself. We teach not subject matter—truths, virtues, ideals—but Children Forgetting itself, the curriculum must exist, only to serve the needs of thoee to whom it ministers.” — G. H. Betts. The Youth Committee of the Presbyterian Chiu oh has issued a valuable lesson on betting and gambling prepared by the Rev. R M. Ryburn. There can b© no question that sound ethical and moral teaching on this subject is very urgently needed both by old and young, and Mr Ryburn has prepared a clear and effective statement that gets to the heart of thb matter. The lesson is set out for teachers who will have to use their own skill and knowledge in breaking it down for their pupils 1 DISTURBING FERMENTS. The following statements should bring consternation to those who look to the Church as the chief agency for characterbuilding in a democracy. “The Church does not take its educational work seriously. The finances of the Church school are not adequate to guarantee the moral integrity of c.ur citizenship. Church and Church school buildings and equipment are meragre and poorly adapted for educational purposes. The organisation and scope of the Sunday school are inadequate to meet the demands of modem life. Untrained, voluntary teachers still carry the chief responsibility of teaching religion to the American people. Millions of American children are not reached by the educational programme of any church. A majority of the Sunday schools use the poorest teaching material on the market.” Those startling words, used by Dean Athoam, of American conditions, in discussing much the most efficient and progressive work so fax evolved, might be used with greater truth of any other country or system in the world. The bright spots as he sees them, and as we in New Zealand begin to see them afar off, ore: —1. The chief points of weakness are clearly recogised, and can bo remedied when resources are mails available. 2. The leadership is clearly pointing the way to a bettor programme. “The darkest spot in the picture is the apathetic clergy and an uninformed, and therefore disinterested lay membership,” The State depends largely upon the educational programme of the church for the moral integrity _of its citizens. The church is failing in its educational task, with a consequent moral letdown among the people, largely because the clergy and laymen do not give it adequate and intelligent support. When these two sentences finally sink into the minds of the people there will be a veritable renaissance in the moral and spiritual life of the church and the nation. THE RELIGIOUS CURRICULUM. "The Religious Curriculum should bring every child to feel the world’s need as his opportunity. He should come to look upon himself as a co-worker with God in the business of building the kingdom; that is, a christianised social order.” The Curriculum Must Fit the Child.— The Bible was not planned as a curriculum, nor wore its materials written for the reading and study of children; ret there is an abundance of suitable materials in the Bible for children if they are selected, simplified here and there, and arranged in a graded system. So with the religious materials from nature, from history, from literature, from music, from art. The individual has a right to demand that this rich field of culture shall be so selected and arranged aa to make it bread instead of stones to the hunger of his mind and heart.”—G. H. Betts. “PERSONALITY AND PSYCHOLOGY.” “Personality and Psychology,” by John Wright But kb am, professor of Christian theology in the Pacific School of Religion, published by Goorge-Doran Company, 1924, is a book for students and serious leaders. The book “is the work not of a psychologist, but of a personalist.” ‘"The volume does not protend to be a discussion of the new psychology, except in its atijtudo toward the self.'’ The opening paragraph indicates something of the ex-pansivene-ss of psychology in recent years. “Until of late psychology constituted a respectable and harmless department of philosophy, confined for the most part to academic traditions and text-books for college classes. It has now become a flood, inundating religious life, business, therapeutics, art, literature, education. It is not altogether easy to say whether this movement has come to bless or to curse. That will depend upon how it is interpreted, and the use to which it is put.” Part I, consisting of eight chapters, deals with a “Psychology of the Self”; whiio Part 11, eight chapters, discusses “Selfless Psychology,” under such heads as: — Habit and Impulse; The Instincts; Behaviourism; Psycho-Analysis; Suggestion and Autosuggestion; The Psychological Man and the Shaping of Solves. Dr Buckham inclines to the more conservative Christian view, as the following extracts will indicate. At the same time he is singularly fair and open-minded. Discussing suggestion and auto-suggestion, he says:—“Dean Inge, that intrepid watchdog of sanity and rationality, calls Coueism bluff, and satirises it as an offence both to reason and religion, and as issuing, along with Pragmatism, Christian Science, Bolshevism, and other falsities from the father of lies. But Dean Inge never had shell-shock or any acute form of nervout breakdown, so far as we know, and his condemnation of auto-suggestion is quite too wholesale and academic. It is true that the ideas and phrases of the psychological cults are many_ of them crude and extravagant, but the principle of autosuggestion itself and the reliance upon a power not ourselves, and yet ourselves, is as old as the human mind.” After speaking of the Bible as “a perfect storehouse of suggestion and autosuggestion,” he continues: “The fact is that a generation of newspaper and magazine readers, devotees of the best sellers and devotees of the movies, has lost touch with the Bible and Christian hymns and the great spiritual literature of the ages and is trying to find its way to strength and support through psychological ideas and practices which arc now only in more or loss scientific and self-conscious externals and technique. This popular propaganda is infinitely inferior to what the Church has possessed for nearlv 20 centuries, but has so far failed to impart to the people. If, through these widespread cults of suggestion and autosuggestion, some measure of normality can be restored to mind and body, they are not to bo condemned, however ’defective their form and content. Y r et the main outcome of this entire chapter of human experience through which we are passing, and the effort to meet the needs of the hour, is to reveal more clearly than over the essential practicality and resourcefulness of Christian faith.”