The Girl in Her Teens

by Margaret Slattery

The average girl in her teens uses it more or less in the preparation of her Sunday-school lesson. She hears certain portions of it read without comment in opening exercises in school; in a comparatively few instances it is read in the morning or evening at home. That is practically all that most girls have to do with the Book whose teachings have so largely made possible the wealth of happiness of the girlhood of to-day.

How to bring the girl in her teens into touch with this Book of books so that it shall exert upon her individual life its wonderful power of transforming, purifying, and strengthening character is a problem.

But those who have been trying hard to meet it have learned some things. They have found out that the girl in her teens knows little of the history of the Book, and that when she is told the story of how we got our Bible she is intensely interested. Its wonderful history, from the time before it lay in parchment rolls on monastery shelves and on through the centuries until it reached the hands of ordinary men and women, and the period of their struggle to learn to read that they might know what it said, stirs the imagination and awakens a host of questions that lead to knowledge.

When she begins to understand what it has cost to preserve the book, how not only men and women, but boys and girls, have loved it and died rather than betray it or disobey its commands, it becomes to her a new book, worthy of her study.

But the history of the Book, although it is necessary and does deeply interest the girl and increase her respect for it, is by no means all we want her to have.

The fragmentary knowledge of Abraham and David, Esther, Ruth and Paul which she has gained in her childhood must be supplemented now by the knowledge of great periods and what the world learned through them. She needs to be shown what the Psalms and some of the chapters of Isaiah and the other prophets have meant to the literature, music and art of the world.

I remember with pleasure the class of girls sixteen and seventeen years old who studied the books of Job and Jonah with me one year. The dramatic element held us, and Job and his friends, Jonah and his struggle, became very real to us. Two years afterward one of the girls, in talking about references to the Bible in literature, said to me, “Well, when they refer to Jonah or Job I’m safe, for those two books I shall never forget.” She can grasp a book as a whole, remember it and enjoy it.

But the study of the Bible under guidance and with every means used to make it interesting and helpful is not all that we want for our girl. She must be led to find in the Bible personal inspiration and help.

Experience so far has taught me that unless the girl in her teens is a member of a Christian Endeavor Society or kindred organization, or a member of the church, she is not likely to read the Bible for herself, nor is it easy to interest her to do so. She may enjoy poetry and really good literature, and be an omnivorous reader, yet never read the Bible. She has often told me frankly that she really does not like to read it because it is not interesting and she does not understand it.

We understand her feeling perfectly. The phraseology is unfamiliar, and her knowledge is not broad enough to help her with the context; and to do anything voluntarily with regularity, unless it is absolutely necessary, is not easy for the average girl in her teens. But every one interested in the future development of the girl’s personal religious life is anxious to establish now, in her early teens, the habit of reading every day the words that have brought new life and salvation to the world.