While I was staying at Hull House, I saw in their theater a moving picture of the life of Moses. The dial of time turned back, we all became spectators of the events of that great life, almost as though we had been his contemporaries. From the basket in the river to Sinai and the golden calf, it was all there, vivid, true to the Bible story and reverent in tone. I left the theater with much the same feeling as though I had heard a great oratorio, and even today the picture which ran its course in fifteen minutes is more vivid than the story which I have read and taught from childhood.
At a lecture in the University of Chicago last summer, the pastor of a Congregational Church in Madison, Wisconsin, came to me and said that he would like to put the moving picture into his Sunday School room, if I could tell him where he could get the films. All that I could say was to get in touch with the film companies and endeavor to get the ones that he wanted, but I knew that he would have trouble.
There are a considerable number of churches that have already introduced the moving picture into their evening service or their Sunday School. But the difficulty is the same everywhere, it is hard to get films that are suitable. Undoubtedly all the Bible stories can be taught more effectively through the moving picture than in any other way. The church ought to teach its lessons by the most effective means at hand, and many churches would be using the moving picture if they could secure suitable films at a reasonable rate. Mr. Edison has already made a good beginning on a series of films to illustrate the work of the public school.
Inasmuch as the churches need a special type of films, why should not the church federations ask the film companies to produce films of this type and start a church exchange? The churches should indicate which pictures they wanted and furnish Bible experts to supervise the making of the films, so as to secure an accurate and reverent reproduction of the stories. These films might then go out with the approval of the federation like a Sunday School lesson leaf. The film companies would be merely the printers of the material furnished them by the federation.
Besides the Bible stories the great morality and passion plays, like Oberammergau, might well be given, and representations of the great social movements, such as recreation, child labor, tuberculosis, and the like, the films for which are largely available at the present time.
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