[29] If the exigencies of the time-table forbid the first hour, then let it be the last.
Subjects for Bible lessons.It is easy enough to find matter for the Bible lessons;[30] the life of our Lord, a three years’ course of Old Testament history, as arranged in Mr. Glazebrook’s three volumes; the life of St. Paul, considered as the setting of his Epistles, and including a general survey of each of those Epistles; a special study of any one of the Prophets, giving the gist of his message, viewed first in the light of his own times and local surroundings, and then considered in its relation to our own times; the women of the Bible; the Jewish feasts and ritual; any one of these courses will provide interesting matter for a year’s lessons.
[30] Full and detailed suggestions on this subject will be found in Mr. Bell’s invaluable little book on Religious Education in Secondary Schools.
A very useful book has recently been written called Ad Lucem,[31] which gives Old Testament history, the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles and Church history up to the present day. Its object is to show the history of the world as bearing on the Incarnation, and it is enabled to cover so much ground by selecting and emphasising such facts as bring out this point of view. It would be interesting to children of about fifteen, and useful to any teacher, by helping her to focus her own teaching.
[31] By the Rev. A. B. Simeon; published by Wells Gardner.
Requisites of a Bible lesson.Probably all teachers will say the difficulty lies rather in how to treat this vast stock of material. There should be no difficulty in making the children feel that the Bible is the most interesting book in the world, quite apart from its religious importance.
So many books on Eastern manners and places are within the reach of teachers that they should not be content till their own conceptions of the Bible scenes and characters are as vivid as Tinworth’s terra cottas.
(a) Vividness.Children have much in common with the old Scotch woman who was so shocked at what seemed to her irreverence in Dean Stanley when he tried to persuade her that Jerusalem was a real place which he had visited; it is a new light to them to be made to realise that Bible heroes and places are as real as those in English history. Doing this arrests their attention, and they go on to perceive that the temptations and virtues of those days were also like our own, that even the minor Prophets, whom they have avoided as utterly alien to their world, speak straight to ourselves in their warnings about wealth and labour and luxury.
(b) Practicality.Until we make Bible lessons practical for ourselves and for our children, we must not be content: in old days the Bible was used only as a storehouse of isolated texts for personal application; we realise now that due reverence for the Word of God requires that we should study it, and teach it, as exactly and reasonably and vividly as we do any other history and literature, but we must not forget that if we stop here, the old-fashioned unintellectual method of study infinitely surpassed in wisdom our modern cleverness. Unless our lessons make the Bible more profitable for doctrine and reproof, for amendment of life and instruction of manners, they are failures, no matter how much critical and geographical learning has been brought to bear on them. (c) Devoutness.Perhaps each lesson need not have a special ethical or spiritual bearing (though it is a pity if it has not), and we should beware against overdoing our moral instruction. A child’s mind is like a narrow-necked bottle, and we often pour in too much at once.
(d) Simplicity.Especially is this the case with illustrations; the teacher has had their use so inculcated that a Bible lesson is too often a string of anecdotes and pictures in which the central idea is hopelessly lost; one truth, one picture, and one illustration are as much as any young child can grasp in one lesson, and children of a larger growth would often gain more if teachers were more economical in their explanations.