The allegory is a double story, or two stories in one. While one story is being told, another, a deeper and often a still more interesting story, is caught by the imagination or reason. Fables and parables are short allegories with one definite moral. The allegory has been the favorite form of story among almost all nations, and is especially pleasing to children. The Bible contains a number of beautiful allegories, one being the comparison of Israel to a vine, in the Eighteenth Psalm. Æsop’s fable of the stomach and its members is an allegory. Some of the most perfect allegories are found in “The Golden Windows,” and “The Silver Crown,” by Laura E. Richards. Ruskin’s “King of the Golden River”; Spenser’s “Faerie Queene”; Swift’s “Tale of a Tub”; Addison’s “Vision of Mirza”; Mrs. Gatty’s “Parables from Nature”; Miss Slossum’s “Story-Tell-Lib”; and, above all, Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” are allegories with which every modern boy and girl should become familiar.
10. HISTORICAL STORIES
Idealistic stories—fairy tales, folk-lore, myths, legends, fables, and allegories—have their place. They add to the poetry, imagery, enjoyment, spirituality, and enrichment of a life that would often be wholly prosaic without them. But after all, the growing boy and girl who pleads “Tell me a true story,” at approximately the age of six, reveals the truth that the mind cannot be satisfied without the solid, hard, real ground of historical and scientific fact. For this reason by far the larger number of stories that must be told, and that are demanded by advancing childhood and youth, are realistic stories. These are stories from national or world history, biography, personal reminiscences and adventures, true stories of animals, and all others that recount actual happenings. “These have a special value because, besides suggesting a principle, they also indicate how it may receive specific application in life. The deeds of the Christian martyrs and of the modest heroes of every-day life have a certain power which is beyond that of the most beautiful myth. The story of what Jesus did means more than all the visions of all the prophets.”[4]
Stories of national history impress the mind of the young with patriotism. Historical world stories inspire the heart of the young with a broader human sympathy for all the nations of the earth. The hunger for the heroic, which is native to the imagination and emotion of every growing boy and girl, may be fed by these classic stories of heroic action, endurance, decision, courage, faith, and self-sacrifice.
11. BIOGRAPHICAL STORIES
“God writes his greatest thoughts in noble men and heroic women.” The Bible is a book of biographies. The Gospels are the four biographies of its preeminent character, Jesus. This is one reason for the great charm of the Bible stories and for the great value of the Bible as a never-failing source from whence to gather material for the unfolding mind of childhood and youth.
History too is largely the story of great lives in their setting. The stories of individuals, and of events in which they are concerned, furnish the best historical material for boys and girls from nine to twelve. Indeed, biography should be central in the study of history at least to the sixteenth year. Suitable stories of the lives of great men and women are interesting at all stages of life, but particularly during the years of later childhood and early adolescence, when environment is widening and social and world interests are expanding. Biography is full of religious nourishment, spiritual contagion, ethical uplift, and humanitarian values. That which makes the strongest appeal is found in the Old and New Testaments, the life of Christ, the Acts of the Apostles, the great lives in national and general history, lives of discoverers, pioneers, missionaries, adventurers, inventors, warriors, seamen, and characters full of deeds of daring and difficulty, but at the same time manly and moral. Biography has too often, in the past, been limited to a record of the heroic deeds of generals and statesmen in war and political upheavals. We now see more clearly the value, in the earlier period of education, of biographies of leaders in other fields besides war and statesmanship, and we realize the necessity of inspiring youth with lofty ideals, by examples of both men and women in all possible forms of human service and moral and social heroism. This truer interpretation of the ethical and spiritual value of biography and history is illustrated by the biographical stories in Chapter X, “Heroes of Peace,” and Chapter XI, “Modern Boys and Girls Who Became Useful.”
12. ALTRUISTIC STORIES
Stories of unselfish heroism appeal to every age, but they find their strongest interest for the spirit of youth during the years of middle adolescence. Such stories of self-sacrifice may be selected from the Bible, history, fiction, or modern life. They not only show what is noble action, but touch the soul with the contagion of self-sacrificing deeds. From the Ethical Index, on page 291, under Altruism, Loyalty, Self-sacrifice, and such synonyms, a list of altruistic stories may be made.