This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1911 edition. Excerpt:... CHAPTER XXI THE CHURCH AND THE CHILD--A GLANCE BACKWARD 205. How Can the "We have seen that educa Church Keep in...., Touch with tion is no mechanical pro Childhood? cess whereby a plastic child is molded upon fixed, unyielding forms, but that it is a vital and personal process in which the teacher must be plastic as well as the child. This is just as true of the church as educator as it is of the individual teacher. To keep in truly educational touch with humanity, the church must be greatly different from any rigid, completed thing, which merely imposes itself upon growing life. It must look to something more than mere "method." The possibilities of the church as educator depend upon her inmost relation to the basal forces of human life. Is the church's life inclusive of life? Is she herself a realisation of the vital forces of a growing soul, or is she abstract, removed from life, incapable of the plasticity that is demanded of every teacher? In a word, the church's relation to education is inseparable from her relation to life in the largest sense. 206. The Child in This truth is well illus 1.1 I Jewish church. Here education blended into one with the national and the family life. The ethnic sense, the family sense, and the religious sense were inseparable, and the child knew no life apart therefrom. As soon as he was old enough to ask questions about the meaning of family religious observances, the parents told him--not a creed, but--a story. It was a story, too, in which he had a part, for it told about his ancestors and their deeds, and about his very own land and home and the things that he could see with his own eyes. Through it he learned of a covenant existing between himself and God, and how certain privileges, rights and...