“Nay, nay,” earnestly spoke the visitor, “let the press go on, but let not its fruit be substituted for the bread of life. Fruit is good, delicious and healthful, but we need the staff of life. _Let the real actual Bible be handled and used in the teaching of the lesson. Then whatever else is wise to use as an auxiliary help may be brought into service_. That is my platform, pure and simple.”
The leader of the meeting was agitated. He impatiently rose to his feet before the last words had fallen from the visitor’s lips.
“Let us use reason,” he said, with a light vein of sarcasm in his voice. “Is it not true that the average child sees enough of the Bible in his home and in the public schools, and that he greatly relishes a change when he comes to the Sunday school?”
“That’s only too true,” spoke up the worldly element who were there in large numbers.
“Let me assure you,” continued the speaker as he was warming to his theme under false fires of devilish sophistry, “in the day when the Bible was used in the Sunday school classes, spiritual ignorance abounded more than now.”
“Why not be satisfied with rapid advancement, instead of inviting retrogression in knowledge, and a double decimation in Sunday school attendance, by compelling scholars to go searching through a book as uninteresting and unfathomable to them as the Bible?”
“One great hindrance to Sunday school work is its pious and sanctimonious tendency. If the schools of the twentieth century are to be successful, we must have less of that Bible stiffness in them, and still more of an open sociability.”
The worldly element and some of the Sunday school teachers were now cheering heartily. But the speaker continued:
“Instead of going to an extreme that means death to the Sunday school by advocating that an army of cold Bibles should go walking into the service, I should rather advocate a change in the other direction, for I am even opposed to the tons of cheap literature filled with cloudy opinions that are now being scattered throughout our schools. We need lesson helps that are interspersed with incidents of adventure, and startling stories that have fire and life in them. Let some publisher take the hint.
“Then the boy or girl whose daily reading may consist of that style of writing will find the Sunday school more congenial to his nature, and he will go there with a bound. In that manner you are certain to win the boy’s heart, after which you can, with tact, send the spiritual truth deeper into his soul. From such a scholar keep the Bible as far away as possible It is not even necessary to lay stress on the fact that the lesson text is, taken from the Bible.