(2) Popularity. Merely to place books on the shelves of a Sunday-school library will not insure the reading of them. This library aims to be emphatically a circulating library. Its books are not for show, but for use; and their place to be seen is not on the shelves of the library-room, but in the homes of the scholars and teachers. It is absolutely essential that no book be placed in the library unless it is sufficiently interesting to be taken out and read, for an unread book is worse than useless in the Sunday-school library. Although its principles be as sound as the Ten Commandments, if it be dull it must be condemned. Students may be willing to plod through an uninteresting book because it is profitable, but ordinary readers, especially youthful readers, will turn from it. Books should not be purchased because they are good, or because they are cheap; nor, on the other hand, should they be chosen only because they are popular; yet an interesting, popular quality should be an absolute requirement in every book placed upon the library shelves.
(3) Literary Quality. Books are influential teachers, and a style like that of Hawthorne or Eliot will unconsciously mold the language of those who read it. On the other hand, the habitual readers of the slang in the comic paragraph of the newspaper will talk in a careless and inelegant manner. Of course, all books should be excluded from the library which deal in low, profane, or immoral language, without regarding the specious plea that such describe life as it is. We do not need to learn the language of the slums to know life; and, as one writer has said, we do not want a realism that can be touched only with a pair of tongs. The best pirate story in the English language is one that is without an oath from cover to cover,[10] and we would not exclude it from the Sunday-school library. Let us seek for writers whose expression is direct, smooth, and cultured. The Sunday school in its literature as well as its teaching should lead upward toward refinement of taste.
(4) Moral Teaching. The ethical standard of every book in the Sunday-school library should be of the highest. Not that every paragraph should end with the application like the Hæc fabula docet of Æsop's fables, or that the characters in a story should be of a "goody-goody" kind, or that none but good people should appear upon the page. There must be some shadows in the perspective that the light may stand in contrast. But in no case should wrong, or sin, or the doubtful moralities of modern society be made attractive. Moral problem stories, in which the boundary lines of right and wrong conduct are crossed and re-crossed until right seems wrong, and wrong seems right, should have no place. "Should love stories be admitted?" Not if the element of love enters as the dominant thought of the book. A story should not be forbidden because there is a pair of lovers in it; but it should not be accepted if the book shows no higher motive than to set forth their passion. Books should be sought that will inculcate a noble manliness for young men and a noble womanliness for young women, and there are such books in numbers sufficient to fill the library shelves.
(5) Christian Spirit. It is not required that every book should set forth and illustrate a spiritual experience. It may be religious without preaching religion. But the morals it inculcates should be founded upon the gospels and inspired by faith. It should be reverent in its treatment of the Bible, of the church, and of the ministry. A book or a story designed to weaken belief in the Scriptures as records of the divine will, or holding the church up to scorn, or showing a minister as its villain, should be kept out of the Sunday-school library. Criticism or discussion of the Bible, of the church, and of the ministry has its place, but its place is not in the Sunday school. The Sunday school is distinctively a religious and a Christian institution, and the atmosphere of the Christian religion should pervade its library.
6. The Coming Sunday-School Library. Another library of a higher type than that designed for the reading and recreation of the scholars is now arising to notice in many advanced Sunday schools, and is destined to become the Sunday-school library of the future, either supplementing the library of the past or taking its place. It is the library which is to the Sunday school what the college library is to the college, a workshop equipped with tools for the use of the teacher and the scholar. It will be at once a reference library, containing the best Bible dictionaries, cyclopedias, expository works, and gospel harmonies, open at certain times for the use of students; and also a lending library of books upon the Bible, upon the Sunday school, upon teaching, upon religion, upon character, and upon the varied forms of social service which are now calling for workers, and will call yet more imperatively in the coming years. The books for this library must be chosen with wisdom; for they should represent the results of the best scholarship, yet be expressed in language that the nonprofessional reader can understand; and many of them must be for the scholars, who are of all ages and all degrees of intelligence. Those of the Primary Department should be able to find in such a library the stories of the Bible told in such a fascinating manner that a child too young to read them may listen to them with interest, and picture-books illustrating the events, the people, the dress, and the landscape of the Bible. It should be planned to meet the needs of every grade in the Sunday school, and to aid every teacher and every scholar; and when established it should be made effective in the educational work of the school. Just as in the secular school and the college students are sent to the library with directions as to the books they will need, so in the Sunday school teachers will be able to counsel their scholars and to give them week-day work, so that the teaching will be more than the talk of the teacher; it will embrace the results of searching on the part of the scholar. Under the system of uniform lessons the use of such a library was well-nigh impracticable, because every class would need the same books at one time. But the uniform lessons are being rapidly displaced by the graded system, giving to each grade its own series of lessons; and this method, requiring different books for each age in the school, will open the way for reference work and study in the library. The time is at hand when such a working library will become a necessity in every well-organized school.
7. The Public Library and the Sunday School. It would seem that wherever the public library is free, available, and well conducted some arrangement might be effected whereby the Sunday-school libraries could be united with the public library. This would lessen expense and difficulty in management, would avoid the unnecessary reduplication of copies of the same books, and would give to the scholars at once a wider selection and the advantage of the open shelf. In more than one town this has been accomplished. The Sunday schools have transferred all their libraries to the public library, to its enlargement, and with no loss of members to the schools. Some Sunday schools in cities have been recognized as branch stations of the public library, giving them the benefit of frequent changes in the equipment of books, which at regular intervals are selected from the store of the public library by the library committee of the school. The working library for teachers and scholars, proposed in the last paragraph, in many places might be established in the public library, wherever the schools in the community will unite to show that it is needed, to name the books required, and to make it practically useful.
XII
THE MANAGEMENT OF THE LIBRARY